SAP and Business Objects to build business-wide dashboard infrastructure

That’s the promise from David Keane, vice president, large enterprise marketing at SAP. “Whereas SAP’s business intelligence systems were very focused on the SAP environment, our emerging systems, with Business Objects, will be focused on enterprise-wide performance management, specifically integrating customers’ heterogeneous systems,” he says. Keane makes the point that large, multi-site manufacturers typically struggle with fragmented reporting and analysis, using disparate systems in the various areas of their organisations. “That causes complexity, cost and ongoing integration issues,” he observes. “Customers want visibility of business processes that, for a variety of reasons, span different solutions. They need to be able to measure their business processes using a single system, whether its SAP or non-SAP… That’s the way to closed lop business optimisation. If they can monitor in real and near real time whet’s happening, then they can start managing the business looking forward rather than just backwards,” he says. And that’s SAP’s goal. Donald MacCormick, chief transformation officer with Business Objects, says the approach follows on from the road map for the two companies’ products, as announced more than a month ago. “Feedback from customers and analysts has been good, and they now understand that there is no requirement for non-SAP users, for example, to move to the Netweaver platform. “Business Objects will remain open access. We’re building a single, scaleable robust platform that can mange their information right across the business, with consistent, coherent and central management, as a shared service infrastructure.” Meanwhile, MacCormick says that the focus is now on putting in place migration programmes for existing users, at whatever level and on whichever software release. “There will inevitably be costs in terms of time and effort in migration – although not software because customers will get like-for-like equivalent functionality – but our current R&D work is designed to minimise that.”