SAP Enhances Its Information Management Portfolio

SAP announced July 20 it has enhanced its SAP BusinessObjects Data Services and SAP BusinessObjects Data Federator, both part of the SAP BusinessObjects information management platform, and integrated them with SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse. The upgrade expands support for SAP customers, allowing them to "extract, profile, cleanse and integrate data from non-SAP sources" and feed it into SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse, the company said in a news release.

In turn, this results in reliable data being fed downstream to business intelligence, CRM, ERP and SCM (supply chain management) applications. The enhanced tools, which include a Web services-based tool kit, allow companies to "more easily embed data integration and data quality capabilities into applications and processes," the company said.

In addition, the information from the SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse can be integrated with other sources into a combined virtual data warehouse.

"We have a significant community of SAP BusinessObjects IM customers that continues to grow, showing that trusted data is top of mind for companies today," Marge Breya, executive vice president and general manager of SAP's Intelligence Platform Group and SAP NetWeaver Solution Management, said in the July 20 statement.

SAP has been busily adding new applications to its stable throughout 2009, perhaps the most prominent being SAP Business Suite 7, which became available worldwide on May 5. The platform can be deployed either in its entirety or as specific modules: SAP ERP, SAP Customer Relationship Management, SAP Supplier Relationship Management, SAP Supply Chain Management and SAP Product Lifecycle Management.

On June 30, SAP rolled out two new applications designed to aid enterprise compliance with government regulations. Those applications, SAP BusinessObjects Risk Management and SAP BusinessObjects Process Control, were also designed to help manage risk and ensure the placement of proper internal controls.

By automatically monitoring risk and regulation compliance, the software would theoretically allow issues such as quality control in a manufacturing line to be identified and addressed before they became costly problems.

SAP and Hewlett-Packard on May 12 announced that they had collaborated to offer a server-based technique that the companies claimed translates into a 700 percent improvement in the processing time needed for a single message, in addition to a 400 percent jump in the volume of messages processed.