We’ve been attending SAP TechEd 2012 over the last several days and have had an opportunity to meet up with a variety of SAP teams. These meetings included one on one discussions with, among others, Oliver Bussmann, executive vice president and SAP’s CIO, as well as Dr. Klaus Schmelzeisen, SAP’s vice president responsible for SAP’s global data and technology services.
These folks, to put it mildly, all have mobility and cloud computing on the mind 24x7 these days – certainly something that warms the heart of mobility-focused editors. We also had an opportunity to interact with Bill McDermott, SAP’s co-CEO during a session he held with the various media people attending TechEd.
All in all, we’ve been quite impressed with what we’ve seen and heard.
SAP is a company that claims to be in a state of highly positive transformation – something we believe is quite true – as it moves from core ERP to becoming a business driven by cloud computing, mobility, and – at the core of the entire company – building out all of its platforms on top of HANNA, its new in-memory OLAP/OLTP database and analytics engine.
HANNA (which is not an acronym, but an actual name) drives everything SAP is now introducing or is planning to offer over the next 6 to 12 months, and is now available as a major cloud-based technology. A great deal of SAP’s efforts are also now being driven by enterprise mobility – the company is convinced that mobile must now be front and center in all of its product offerings, and SAP is making significant strides in delivering here.
We’ll take deeper looks at both HANNA and some of SAP’s major mobile plans over the next few days. We’ll start our coverage with the company’s latest effort, which focuses on mobile-driven, real time analytics.
Image via Shutterstock
Mobile Analytics – The Major Leagues
SAP has announced new mobile-focused analytics and mobile dashboard capabilities –SAP Business Planning and Consolidation 10.0 - for its SAP Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) Unwired platform. The key goal for the new application is to provide direct access to decision-critical information through next-generation user experiences on mobile devices.
SAP has added an additional and very powerful new twist to this – a new “Explorer” capability that allows mobile users to conduct “open-ended information discovery.” The availability of such mobile-focused financial planning and analysis data enables decision makers to go beyond simply accessing information to inputting information. The application is part of a series of mobile innovations announced over the last year in business intelligence (BI), cloud-based enterprise performance management (EPM), governance, risk and compliance (GRC) and applied analytics.
SAP EPM Unwired (available in the Apple App Store for iPads), is the mobile entry point into the umbrella SAP EPM OnDemand platform. SAP EPM Unwired provides users with a mobile front-end as part of the EPM suite on the device of their choice (as long as that device is an iPad – at least for the immediate future, though Android and Windows 8 are on the roadmap). This gives users the ability to plan, budget, forecast and consolidate anywhere, on demand.
The chief goal SAP has for mobile analytics is to easily drive the huge collections of SAP analytics dashboards that already exist on enterprise laptops out to the mobile world of tablets (as noted above, tablets that are called iPads). But the goal goes further – SAP is looking for its mobile analytics to be managed through a single application and a single, well-developed UI/UX, so that there is essentially one highly recognizable mobile application that handles all mobile dashboards.
Further, SAP’s goal is even more ambitious – it wants to drive all of this to work within HANNA, and even further, to work up in the cloud. The ability to drive mobile analytics through cloud-based HANNA is very powerful, and is the critical key to being able to conduct open-ended mobile-based information discovery across potentially vast quantities of data. We’ll take a deeper look at HANNA and SAP’s cloud thinking in upcoming articles – stay tuned.
Dashboard development can easily become somewhat complex – depending on the myriad of SAP platforms that different enterprises currently make use of. The goal is to consolidate these under one easy to use dashboard designer platform that makes use of SAP’s “Collaborate, Annotate and Email” paradigm (we will note here that “Collaborate” will soon evolve into SAP’s newer “Jam” capabilities – a discussion of which is outside the scope of what we’re covering here) - mobile dashboard design can easily become a collaborative effort, or it can remain the domain of individual users.
There is More Coming Soon
Some examples of what SAP has already delivered on the mobile analytics front over the last 12 months include:
· SAP BusinessObjects Mobile - The mobile entry point for BI content, including SAP® Crystal Reports® and SAP® BusinessObjects™ Web Intelligence® software. Users can easily understand business impact, collaborate with stakeholders and take action directly from the software. The most recent 4.3 release has extended visualization capabilities and language support for French, German, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Polish.
· SAP BusinessObjects Explorer mobile app - "Big data" can be searched and explored through dynamic exploration views that feature Google maps integration, augmented reality and the ability to personalize visualizations. The discovery capabilities noted above tie into this service.
What can we expect to see over the next four to six months or so? SAP’s Mimi Spier, senior director, global marketing for mobile analytics, tells us to look for two specific things:
· With a probable delivery date of Q1 2013, SAP will ship an SDK that will allow enterprises to brad their dashboards as their own mobile applications; will allow developers to integrate with Afaria and third party MDM platforms; most importantly, the SDK will allow enterprises to fully integrate analytics within any mobile application they may be building. All of this can be directly ties back to HANNA and the cloud.
· Look for the ability, before 2012 is out, to deliver HTML5 dashboards, which will have the advantage, of course, of working across any mobile device that supports HTML5.
These will prove to be highly valuable tools for enterprises to continue to build out and enhance their mobile BI and analytics capabilities. Branding and in-app analytics will drive all sorts of new enterprise mobile apps – something we look forward to exploring as they become real. Meanwhile, the ability to tie back to HANNA means that these dashboards will be able to offer essentially unlimited access to any collection of data – even if that data consists of billions of data elements. The in-memory design of HANNA also means that users of these new mobile applications and dashboards can expect to see super-fast response times.
SAP claims to be transforming itself. Not only is it doing so, but based on the technologies we’ve seen this week – of which mobile analytics is but a piece, it will also do its part to help its customers transform themselves into state of the art, 21st century mobile businesses.
For mobile editors that is good news indeed.
Edited by
Amanda Ciccatelli 
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