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Better information is finally available that details how SAP is planning to integrate its disparate business intelligence portfolio. Having purchased BusinessObjects more than a year ago, there was a fair bit of trepidation and uncertainty in the SAP customer base. No clear path for the future solution environment regarding SAP BI was communicated, other than a rather generic and cryptic statement to indicate that further information would be made available at a later date.

That’s fair enough. The SAP product suite has grown by leaps and bounds and the addition of an entire product portfolio doesn’t help. The good news is that the strategic direction SAP has chosen makes sense: it basically consists of selecting the best of breed products from the entire portfolio, arranging solution components where they make sense and cutting sub-standard products out entirely.

The existing SAP business intelligence portfolio is billed as a complete stack, whilst the BusinessObjects product set is deemed to be open and agnostic to underlying technologies.

A single platform consisting of SAP and BusinessObjects products is to provide full access to critical information for anyone in the enterprise, from the executive to the general business person. Of course, business requirements are diverse in an enterprise.

As I mentioned above, SAP has taken the decision to integrate the BusinessObjects product range with their existing BI stack. That obviously means that certain products will no longer be maintained and will be phased out.

Here’s my opinion: SAP is excellent when it comes to providing a very robust, stable and fully-featured backend infrastructure. Unfortunately, the guys in Walldorf don’t share the same acumen with their countrymen scarcely 100km down the road at Porsche. Traditionally, anything that SAP has produced that interacts directly with the end user is rather shocking. Hardly user-friendly, generally ugly and certainly not easy to modify. The Enterprise Portal is a prime example. Sure, it’s possibly to meld it into something that reflects the look and feel a company may wish to provide its customer base and end users. But its hard work and not always easily achievable. Even the SAPGUI has only become a bit better looking since the German product made it big in the US some years ago…

With that in mind, it’s a relief to see that common sense has prevailed and that the strengths in each product suite are being exploited. Granted, BusinessObjects don’t really have much to compete in the backend space, but their user interface is nothing short of spectacular.

The speed and flexibility with which one can build interactive dashboards with Xcelsius is quite astounding. The SAP Business Explorer (BEx) is best not mentioned in comparison. The raw power and flexibility of the core business warehouse backend is the existing SAP BI system, providing cubes and other data structures together with rock-solid ETL tools.

Report Designer gives way to Crystal Reports. Web App Designer gives way to Xcelsius. BEx gives way to Pioneer. Pioneer is a new product that will provide for easier and more advanced analysis on OLAP data sources. Pioneer will replace the existing Voyager product and will provide backward compatability to legacy query views and BEx workbooks.

The strategy makes sense to me, and should provide existing SAP BI customers with a means of finally providing their end users with something they must have been yearning for for years: a pretty, easy to use front end.

And of course easy access to the data they really need to do their job. How could I have forgotten about that…