The vendor landscape remains diverse, with every vendor touting some or near total corporate performance management (CPM) capabilities. The abundance of astute vendors will prevent any single vendor from achieving leadership any time soon, while growth for all will be, in part, hampered by increasing pricing pressures. Thus, the "arms race" to marshal the most complete CPM platform has been intensified among major vendors, and many have a comprehensive set of business intelligence (BI) functionality, including online analytical processing (OLAP) analytics, ad hoc query, end user reporting, enterprise reporting, planning, and some type of analytic dashboards or balanced scorecards.
Part Five of the Business Intelligence Report Status Quo series. Parts One to Three were published June 27�June 29
While 2003 saw a major onslaught of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) in the market involving large BI vendors like Cognos, Business Objects, SAS, Actuate, and Hyperion (see Has the BI Market Consolidation Been Crystal-Clearly Actuated?), 2004 and 2005 have also had their smaller share of M&A, with IBM acquiring AlphaBlox and Ascential, and Cognos acquiring Frango and Optima Analytic Solutions.
The pressure for these pure-play BI players also comes from large enterprise applications vendors like SAP, Microsoft, Oracle, or Siebel and their resources and business motivation to invest in their own BI solutions. This includes the underlying technology and the analytical applications, with their install base as the primary target.
or example, SAP is changing the positioning of its business information warehouse, SAP BW, to become a part of SAP NetWeaver, a platform aimed at delivering infrastructural functionality like collaboration, portal, business process management (BPM), application integration, and BI across the entire enterprise applications landscape. (For more details, see SAP Bolsters NetWeaver's MDM Capabilities). It opted for this route instead of delivering a packaged standalone data warehouse (DW), as was initially marketed after its launch in 1998.
Building on the successes of SAP NetWeaver BI, and the Strategic Enterprise Management (SEM) suite, SAP, during its European SAPPHIRE '05 user conference, unveiled more than 100 industry-specific analytic applications built on the SAP NetWeaver platform. These applications should empower users with new ways to drive core processes and business decisions based on actionable business insight. Accordingly, SAP Analytics are a new breed of model-driven, composite applications across more than twenty-five industries. SAP Analytics aim at merging data from SAP and non-SAP applications with BI queries, to eliminate disparate islands of data. They will also combine transactional, analytic, and collaborative steps across multiple business functions, departments, and even organizational boundaries.
Unlike traditional after-the-fact reporting tools, SAP Analytics applications will aim at pulling all relevant information—whether historical or current—from across a wide variety of enterprise systems to deliver clear and broad business insight that should help users drive current processes and take the wisest possible steps. These will reportedly deliver data in the business context of the specific process—letting a business manager know, for example, not only the day's sales figures but also whether these figures are on target compared against past performance and the current year's revenue goals.
Reportedly, each SAP Analytics application will be designed to easily be combined and extended with other analytics applications, and will play a specific role across areas such as SCM, CRM, and product lifecycle management (PLM). Some examples include
* SAP Analytics for retail will help store managers better understand and predict the performance of core activities, such as trade-promotions, in order to make adjustments to processes and strategies while there is time to impact outcomes.
* SAP Analytics for credit management will allow financial service companies to display customers' credit information, buying behavior, past purchases, and credit lines in the historical context of data stored in SAP and non-SAP systems or syndicated data sources such as Dun & Bradstreet. From inside the same application, users can then increase or stop access to credit lines for a given customer or partner and even block or authorize individual purchases.
* SAP Analytics for tax management will complement the SAP for Public Sector solution. It will allow organizations to better monitor and understand the tax basis, where contributions are coming from in the context of historical tax collection, and take steps to reclaim amounts due using the same application.
* SAP Analytics for high-tech manufacturing will allow managers and other employees at production plants and warehouses to gain an insight into order status, plant utilization, order backlog and restock levels. Some SAP partners have consequently built SAP Analytics applications that unify manufacturing execution system (MES) data with order supply chain and production data from SAP systems in order to provide highly granular views down to individual machines' uptime status and throughput capacity.
* SAP Analytics for CRM will continue to complement the mySAP CRM solution by providing visualization across marketing, lead generation, pipeline visibility, sales effectiveness, and individual customer views. By unifying sales data with financial data, fulfillment data, and manufacturing inventory data, SAP Analytics for CRM will empower sales executives and corporate offices with a complete view of customer buying patterns and profitability allowing them to detect hidden opportunities for future business growth.
SAP touts that its model-driven, code-free, and services-enabled design environment, SAP Analytics, will allow business users and analysts to easily deploy, configure, and combine analytic applications to customize SAP Analytics to support evolving business requirements. Further, SAP Analytics leverage SAP NetWeaver Visual Composer, Macromedia Flex, and multiple platform capabilities including BI and enterprise portal, which should provide industry savvy system integrators (SI) with the applications and tools to support their clients' evolving business needs. Independent software vendors (ISV) and syndicated content providers will also likely benefit from these new applications and tools. They will be able to better help mutual customers, as both partners and ISVs will be able to build new analytic applications by becoming certified in the Powered by SAP NetWeaver program. SAP Analytics will be available toward the end of 2005 and sold as add-on products. One should note, however, that SAP currently has analytics that are sold with SAP BW, whereas SAP's new move mainly adds additional industry-specific analytics. In any case, both old and new capabilities still also require the implementation of SAP BW to get the analytics.
Part Five of the Business Intelligence Report Status Quo series. Parts One to Three were published June 27�June 29
While 2003 saw a major onslaught of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) in the market involving large BI vendors like Cognos, Business Objects, SAS, Actuate, and Hyperion (see Has the BI Market Consolidation Been Crystal-Clearly Actuated?), 2004 and 2005 have also had their smaller share of M&A, with IBM acquiring AlphaBlox and Ascential, and Cognos acquiring Frango and Optima Analytic Solutions.
The pressure for these pure-play BI players also comes from large enterprise applications vendors like SAP, Microsoft, Oracle, or Siebel and their resources and business motivation to invest in their own BI solutions. This includes the underlying technology and the analytical applications, with their install base as the primary target.
or example, SAP is changing the positioning of its business information warehouse, SAP BW, to become a part of SAP NetWeaver, a platform aimed at delivering infrastructural functionality like collaboration, portal, business process management (BPM), application integration, and BI across the entire enterprise applications landscape. (For more details, see SAP Bolsters NetWeaver's MDM Capabilities). It opted for this route instead of delivering a packaged standalone data warehouse (DW), as was initially marketed after its launch in 1998.
Building on the successes of SAP NetWeaver BI, and the Strategic Enterprise Management (SEM) suite, SAP, during its European SAPPHIRE '05 user conference, unveiled more than 100 industry-specific analytic applications built on the SAP NetWeaver platform. These applications should empower users with new ways to drive core processes and business decisions based on actionable business insight. Accordingly, SAP Analytics are a new breed of model-driven, composite applications across more than twenty-five industries. SAP Analytics aim at merging data from SAP and non-SAP applications with BI queries, to eliminate disparate islands of data. They will also combine transactional, analytic, and collaborative steps across multiple business functions, departments, and even organizational boundaries.
Unlike traditional after-the-fact reporting tools, SAP Analytics applications will aim at pulling all relevant information—whether historical or current—from across a wide variety of enterprise systems to deliver clear and broad business insight that should help users drive current processes and take the wisest possible steps. These will reportedly deliver data in the business context of the specific process—letting a business manager know, for example, not only the day's sales figures but also whether these figures are on target compared against past performance and the current year's revenue goals.
Reportedly, each SAP Analytics application will be designed to easily be combined and extended with other analytics applications, and will play a specific role across areas such as SCM, CRM, and product lifecycle management (PLM). Some examples include
* SAP Analytics for retail will help store managers better understand and predict the performance of core activities, such as trade-promotions, in order to make adjustments to processes and strategies while there is time to impact outcomes.
* SAP Analytics for credit management will allow financial service companies to display customers' credit information, buying behavior, past purchases, and credit lines in the historical context of data stored in SAP and non-SAP systems or syndicated data sources such as Dun & Bradstreet. From inside the same application, users can then increase or stop access to credit lines for a given customer or partner and even block or authorize individual purchases.
* SAP Analytics for tax management will complement the SAP for Public Sector solution. It will allow organizations to better monitor and understand the tax basis, where contributions are coming from in the context of historical tax collection, and take steps to reclaim amounts due using the same application.
* SAP Analytics for high-tech manufacturing will allow managers and other employees at production plants and warehouses to gain an insight into order status, plant utilization, order backlog and restock levels. Some SAP partners have consequently built SAP Analytics applications that unify manufacturing execution system (MES) data with order supply chain and production data from SAP systems in order to provide highly granular views down to individual machines' uptime status and throughput capacity.
* SAP Analytics for CRM will continue to complement the mySAP CRM solution by providing visualization across marketing, lead generation, pipeline visibility, sales effectiveness, and individual customer views. By unifying sales data with financial data, fulfillment data, and manufacturing inventory data, SAP Analytics for CRM will empower sales executives and corporate offices with a complete view of customer buying patterns and profitability allowing them to detect hidden opportunities for future business growth.
SAP touts that its model-driven, code-free, and services-enabled design environment, SAP Analytics, will allow business users and analysts to easily deploy, configure, and combine analytic applications to customize SAP Analytics to support evolving business requirements. Further, SAP Analytics leverage SAP NetWeaver Visual Composer, Macromedia Flex, and multiple platform capabilities including BI and enterprise portal, which should provide industry savvy system integrators (SI) with the applications and tools to support their clients' evolving business needs. Independent software vendors (ISV) and syndicated content providers will also likely benefit from these new applications and tools. They will be able to better help mutual customers, as both partners and ISVs will be able to build new analytic applications by becoming certified in the Powered by SAP NetWeaver program. SAP Analytics will be available toward the end of 2005 and sold as add-on products. One should note, however, that SAP currently has analytics that are sold with SAP BW, whereas SAP's new move mainly adds additional industry-specific analytics. In any case, both old and new capabilities still also require the implementation of SAP BW to get the analytics.
No comments:
Post a Comment