The roadmap of HANA

Here is  another taste of what can we expect from HANA in the upcoming years :

http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/24398

BI4 Knowledge Center

If you want to know exactly what awaits for you in the next version of SAP Business Objects and

what changes are about to be made you can enter the following link and read all the new manuals

http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/boc/bi

The future of BI by Timo elliott

A question that always on my mind: how will  BI look like in 5 / 10 years from now...?
Timo elliot from SAP speaks and presents the vision of SAP in a series of presentations and videos :

http://timoelliott.com/blog/2010/07/presentation-the-future-of-business-intelligence.html

Matrix acquires 75% from Matchpoint for 10 million Shekels

Matrix continues its acquisition campaign and according to estimates, in order to improve efficiency and continue to be a major player in the Israeli IT market Match point have been acquired.

Match point specializes in outsourcing

Read original article here:
http://www.calcalist.co.il/internet/articles/0,7340,L-3517367,00.html

Saleforce acquired Radian6

When I reviewed the future of the BI at the end of last year I expected that social network layer will begin to trickle into the BI layer.

While SAP has already begun to develop products that integrates the organization social network data,

Saleforce is one of the first companies to make significant step towards implemeting social networks by purchasing Radian6which  is the leading supplier of social media monitoring.

Here is the link for the original article:

http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/30/salesforce-buys-social-media-monitoring-company-radian6-for-326-million/

SAP and IBM Test SAP In-Memory Appliance

The innovation war continues:

SAP will collaborate with IBM (which bought Cognos) in order to integrate the in memory technologies.

Currently DB2 is beeing tested .

If we wll also consider the replication server of SAP the and intention to replace the usual load services, we have a more immediate view on the future of the BI and technological environment

that awaits us:

http://www.sap.com/corporate-en/press.epx?pressid=14906

http://it.themarker.com/tmit/article/14603

HANA is here

If you have not heard about the new project of Sap,Hana - High-Performance Analytic Appliance - a project which should bring the best of bread in terms of performance.

I think that there is no doubt that the future of BI has to grow through the in memory capabilities

and SAP is getting us close to that place.

http://timoelliott.com/blog/2010/12/sap-introduces-first-hana-enabled-application-links-and-screen-shots.html

Here is a quick review written about HANA in the http://biscorecard.typepad.com/biscorecard/ :

"Queries that the customer used to run in two to three hours now run in two to three seconds. The data volumes were not that big – 9 million customer records. But it’s the complexity of customer segmentation and that the queries were running directly in the transactional source system that made for the slow queries. Christian Ritter, head of Reporting and Global IT at Hilti, explained that with HANA, they would skip building a data warehouse altogether. Data is replicated in near real time from the SAP transaction systems into HANA."

Xcelsius version X4.0

In the new version of SAP Business Objects , Xcelsius presentation can be built (say SAP Dashboard from now ...) directly on a universe without the necessity to use an Excel sheet.

Watch this video that demonstrates how to easily build an Xcelsius dashboard in the new version :

BI trends for 2011

What awaits for us this year?

Read here the article by Cindi Howson from BI scorecard:

http://biscorecard.typepad.com/biscorecard/2011/01/big-themes-in-bi-for-2011.html

And here is the Gartner forecast for 2011:
http://www.gartner.com/technology/media-products/reprints/qliktech/article3/article3.html

Xcelsius 2011: Direct query binding

In the next version of  Xcelsius you will be able to built a presentation without the use of a spreadsheet.
Here's a short video from the recent User conference that demonstrates the new capabilities :