7 Reasons to Learn SAP BO on HANA

The first French company to be listed on the NASDAQ is BusinessObjects which went public in 1994. A nine years later BusinessObjects acquired Crystal Decisions for $820 million.

BusinessObjects next released Dashboard Manager, BusinessObjects Enterprise 6, and BusinessObjects Performance Manager. Finally, SAP bought out BusinessObjects for $6.8 billion in 2008. BusinessObjects turned into a division of SAP and the brand “SAP BusinessObjects” was born.

With SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) solutions, organizations have at their disposal industry-leading and historically proven BI user-friendly applications that help you to manage your Enterprise Reporting Requirements. Most organizations have needs such as report formatting, ad-hoc query and analysis on relational or multi-dimensional data sources, or data visualizations and KPIs (Key Point Indicators). SAP BusinessObjects BI solutions provide a single BI platform that empowers your business users to make highly efficient data centric business decisions.

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) solutions can empower your teams to attain amazing results by permitting anyone in the enterprise with self-service access to relevant information. And also by helping business users transform their decision-making by giving fact-based, quality information irrespective of where the data is located. SAP BusinessObjects BI solutions provide comprehensive functionality for the following:

• Reporting and Analysis
• Dashboards
• Data exploration
• Mobile
• BI platform

Business Object Technology

Business object technology and business object programming are based on the concept of “BusinessObject”. Real world objects, for example an employee or a sales order, are modeled as BusinessObjects in Business Application systems.

One can visualize the SAP BusinessObjects as black boxes that encapsulate data and business processes, thus concealing the details of the structure and implementation of the underlying data.

How It Works?

Using the interface in the SAP BusinessObjects BI On demand solution, one can follow an intuitive process to upload a spreadsheet, bring in different data sources, and explore enterprise data with the software’s distinct search and browse functionality. The integrated solution allows one to generate precise and timely Dashboards and Reports. This means it is no longer needed to consolidate sales reports from disparate sources or manually create pivot tables, charts, and graphs. You can also perform Ad hoc “what-if” analyses. And there’s no express need to share spreadsheets and reports via e-mail or paper – instead, one can share the information online. Partner offerings for industry and business-specific uses are available.

Key Features

SAP BusinessObjects being an industry powerhouse, gives organizations a full set of tools to manage and optimize Business Intelligence (BI) with its cohesive, consolidated approach. Enterprises can handle anything from ETL and data cleansing to predictive dashboards from a centralized portal. It also has the capability to generate a variety of reports such as Crystal Reports, OLAP, Ad hoc and more.

• It is the complete solution- one can Explore, report, and share all in a single, integrated platform
• Using BO’s powerful search and browse functionality organizations can supercharge searching and browsing to find the right information at the right time for enterprise needs
• Combined data brings together data from various sources to generate a single report for a holistic and consolidated view
• Preconfigured, customizable templates enables creation of interactive visualizations, data sets, charts, and graphs
• Ad hoc reporting enables execution of what-if analysis
• On-time reporting is made possible through scheduling and data sharing, generation of reports, and dashboards online securely, inside or outside the enterprise
• An intuitive interface enables accelerated learning in turn enabling enterprises to ramp up rapidly
• SAP BO has a free trial which enables users to try it for free, then procure scalable, subscription-based solutions
• BO uses folder-level security to restrict access and help ensure data security
• Being an SaaS (Software as a Service) offering, BO enables an enterprise to be up and running quickly without software or hardware installation
• Enterprises can streamline operations by leveraging a hosted data warehouse and development environment simultaneously
• Industry and business-specific offerings enable solutions for industry and specific line-of-business uses through partners.

 Business Challenges Addressed

Few of the challenges addressed have been listed below:

• Outdated or limited information available, impeding informed decision making are solved using BO
• Resolution of the lack of accessible or easy-to-use BI tools for business users
• Antidote to the limited availability of reports that provide a comprehensive view of the business
• Replacing time-intensive, manual processes to consolidate and collate data and generate reports, dashboards, graphs and charts using BO
• Disparate processes to share information inside or outside the enterprise
• Limited resources and budget for supporting Business Intelligence

Considering the massive potential within SAP BO in the immediate future, here are Seven Reasons for professionals to learn SAP BO on HANA:

1.  Massive Resources

BusinessObjects is a highly established brand that’s been in its respective niche right from its inception. Since BusinessObjects is backed by massive resources, it is sustainable as a tool in the long run. A recent survey statistic has shown that SAP rakes in more than $3 billion in annual business revenues and contributes to nearly one quarter of the market share in its domain. This means SAP has both the financial and technical resources to go through development cycles and enhance their products as necessary. It has its adoption rates that increase exponentially with time which means finding a developer skilled in BusinessObjects’ proprietary language is a practical task.

2. Nearly Endless Scalability

BusinessObjects is an enterprise reporting tool with limitless scalability, whereas SAP’s other popular Business Intelligence tools, Crystal Reports and Crystal Reports Server, are architected to serve small to medium sized businesses. This means, BusinessObjects can handle the task and scale as your organization grows whether your enterprise has 10,000 users or a 100,000 users or even a whole lot more. The base platform can be scaled both horizontally and vertically to meet the growing demand on Windows or Linux. Scalability is one of the key reasons large corporations select BusinessObjects over other alternatives for their BI requirements.

3. Robust Feature Set which provide Information Clarity and Insight

Along with scalability, another massive benefit of BusinessObject is that it can manage a plethora of reporting tasks of varying complexities. It is for this reason that most Fortune 500 companies have opted for standardization with BusinessObjects as a baseline platform. This means such organizations have bought a high-end enterprise license and adopted BusinessObjects as their company’s reporting standard. One can empower your business users by providing them the ability to readily generate ad-hoc queries and manage powerful data analysis to gain deeper business insights. And this is irrespective of your database platform complexity.

4. Versatile Integration

BusinessObjects can link to a wide range of data sources like XML and OLAP. It can also link to a large number of integration points such as Java, SharePoint, .NET, and Microsoft Office. According to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, integration with other enterprise applications is one of the key reasons many enterprises choose SAP as their BI vendor over other options. A suite of developer tools are also integrated into the base platform to provide the use of the right tool for the required task.

5.  Strong Administrative and Data Governances

BusinessObjects has all the characteristics and tools required for large scale user deployment, access and security control. It can integrate with various standards such as LDAP security providers and Single-Sign-On (SSO) solutions for user provisioning, and has the level of security required to restrict access at the reporting level. Several software vendors are able to integrate their security models with the Business Object API to give data level security as well. It has strong in-built security that can be customized and granular right down to the object level. It also has integrated security modules that can be used with third party security interfaces.

6. Effectively Streamline Business Intelligence Operations

You can implement SAP BusinessObjects BI solutions which better streamlines your Business Intelligence operations by enhancing the business user information request process. The objective is to get your IT department to expend less time intercepting and interpreting information requests. Users must be allowed to define information requirements, create queries, analyse and share information with less reliance on IT. Online report development for all queries is a major advantage for this platform. This means BusinessObjects utilizes a Symantec layer to transform the complex underlying data to user identifiable objects for business queries. This makes it a great choice for self-service environments.

7. Maintaining Long Term Operational Sustainability and Financial Growth and Minimizing TCO

SAP BusinessObjects provides a framework of data extraction and analysis that aids in business leaders making data centric managerial decisions that will eventually help boost the bottom line and maintain operational stability and efficiency over the long term. SAP BusinessObjects BI solutions minimizes the BI TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) by giving a single, integrated, scalable, highly available, Business Intelligence enterprise platform with a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) that is an award winning one.

Conclusion

In the current day volatile economy, organizations and professionals alike require solutions that can deliver the insight needed to understand enterprise data, and use it to make much better decisions. At the same time, both the organization and individual needs functionality that can streamline business processes and aid in managing the enterprise so the focus is always on sustainable growth.

SAP BusinessObjects provides solutions for anything from small and medium enterprises to large enterprises. It comes with the capability to be configured for a broad spectrum of industries, from government entities and manufacturing and distribution to financial services, non-profit organizations and a whole lot more.

The key advantage to SAP BusinessObjects is that the solution can grow with a company, allowing organizations to incorporate and bring about additional tools as and when needed. This eliminates the need to integrate various disparate solutions that can lead to a bulky system which isn’t user-friendly. SAP’s intuitive, standardized solution promotes high end-user adoption and SAP BusinessObjects offers a mature, industry-leading solution for holistic Business Intelligence.

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