1. September 9–11, 2013
Anaheim, California
SAP’s Commitment to Open Data Access Strategy for BI
Henry Kam
Saskia Battersby

2. Legal Disclaimer
The information in this presentation is confidential and proprietary to SAP and may not be
disclosed without the permission of SAP. This presentation is not subject to your license
agreement or any other service or subscription agreement with SAP. SAP has no obligation to
pursue any course of business outlined in this document or any related presentation, or to
develop or release any functionality mentioned therein. This document, or any related
presentation and SAP's strategy and possible future developments, products and or platforms
directions and functionality are all subject to change and may be changed by SAP at any time for
any reason without notice. The information in this document is not a commitment, promise or
legal obligation to deliver any material, code or functionality. This document is provided without
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All forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause
actual results to differ materially from expectations. Readers are cautioned not to place undue
reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of their dates, and they should
not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions.

3. SAP BusinessObjects
 Commitment to open
Commitment to diverse
technology landscapes continues
to be a priority
3

4. Investments
Agnostic Roadmap on SMP
Product Investments
New data sources
4

5. Partnership Announcement
Support for Oracle OLAP
Support for Salesforce.com
5

6. Open, agnostic, and unified
On Demand
Services
Browsers
Mobile Devices
Self-Service
Dashboards and Apps
Embedded
Content
MS Office
Enterprise
Portals
Reporting
Business Intelligence Platform
Semantic Layer
SAP
HANA
ERP
EDW
SAP Business Suite
SAP NetWeaver BW
Oracle E-Business Suite
Teradata
PeopleSoft
Other data warehouses
JD Edwards
Oracle, IBM DB2,
Microsoft SQL Server
and other relational data
sources
SAP HANA Platform
OLAP Cubes
MS Excel
Unstructured data
in Social Media and
Hadoop

7. Unified Data Access Strategy – Before
Inconsistent Data Access coverage
Different client tools accessed data
differently
7

8. Unified Data Access Strategy - Now
Single Version of the Truth via Semantic
Layer
Centralized Data Access support via new
Semantic Layer
Salesforce.com and SAP ERP Data Access
centralized in Universes
8

9. SAP BusinessObjects Semantic Layer
Empower business users with the autonomy they need to
access, analyze, enrich, and share information freely and
securely using familiar business terms
Common business concepts for all front-ends
Common business concepts for all front-ends
Empower all
Empower all
people, enable
people, enable
all workflows
all workflows
High performance,
High performance,
feature rich
feature rich
secure access
secure access
Web Intelligence, Crystal Reports, Dashboards, Explorer,
Lumira, Predictive Analysis, SDKs*
Best access method for each specific data source
Best access method for each specific data source
Direct Access
Direct Access
Universe Access
Universe Access
All data sources
All data sources
Connect to all
Connect to all
data sources
data sources
SAP HANA
SAP BW
Sybase
OLAP
Any Relational
Hadoop
Files,
Database Web services,
ODBC, JDBC

10. Low TCO BW Access in BI 4.0
Before: Silo’ed connectivities
in SAP BusinessObjects XI 3.1
Crystal
Reports
BAPI
Web
Intelligence
Universe
Xcelsius
BICS
After: Unified direct BICS access
in SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.0
Crystal Reports, Web Intelligence,
Dashboards, Design Studio and
Analysis
BICS
MDX
BEx Query
BEx Query
InfoProviders
InfoProviders
SAP NetWeaver BW
SAP NetWeaver BW

11. Universe semantic layer authoring Java SDK
 Allows developers to programmatically:
•
•
•
•
•
Create universes
Customize universes
Deploy universes
Administer universes
Automate universes
 Universe Designer (.UNV)
• Universe COM SDK for .UNV still available
• Applications written in XI 3.x COM SDK still
supported

12. Supported SAP Data Sources for Universes
SAP NetWeaver BW
SAP ERP
SAP HANA
SAP MaxDB
Sybase SQL Anywhere
Sybase, Adaptive Server Enterprise
Sybase IQ
SAP EPM BPC (Business Planning and
Consolidation)
EPM PCM (Profitability & Cost Management)
EPM SSM (SAP Strategy Management)
EPM FC (Financial Consolidation)
SAP Data Federator
12

13. Supported Non-SAP Data Sources for Universes
13

14. Options to support additional data sources
Conditionally Supported database
platforms
Standards-based drivers, vendorsupported ODBC or JDBC drivers
14

15. Standards-based Driver Support
 Standards Based drivers must comply with
the following design guidelines:
 Database server, Client and ODBC/JDBC driver
used must support multiple threads.
 Vendor-supported drivers:
 ODBC drivers must be ODBC Level 2compliant
 ODBC driver must support multiple
connections (for IM products only)
 JDBC drivers must be JDBC Type 4compliant
 In case of issues, to get support the
customer is requested to attempt to
reproduce issue by reference:
 For ODBC on SQL Server
 For JDBC on MySQL
15

16. Support for new agnostic sources in 4.1
 New non-relational sources
• oData 2.0 data sources
• XML files
• Web services with WSDL 1.1 (SOAP)
 New relational sources
•
•
•
•
Oracle Exadata
Teradata 14
Hive on Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce)
DB2 10 for zOS via JDBC, DB2 for zOS 10.1, DB2 LUW 10 & 10.1,
DB2 for i v7.1
• Sybase ASE 15.7
• Oracle via ODBC (in addition to OCI and JDBC)
• PostgreSQL 9, MS SQL Server 2012, Greenplum 4.1 & 4.2
 New SSO support
• HANA through SAML
• Teradata
• Sybase IQ

17. oData Support
 SAP is part of the group that created the
oData standard
• Along with MSFT and IBM
• Open data protocol = a Web protocol for
querying and updating data
 There are 2 sides to oData
• oData consumption: access an oData compliant
data source
• oData provisioning: expose a data stream as
oData
 oData roadmap for Semantic Layer
• oData consumption: available in 4.1
• oData provisioning: will be supported in the
upcoming SL consumption SDK

18. oData consumption in BI 4.1 - a new connectivity
 The oData connection is defined in the information design tool
 The designer can author a UNX universe against an oData service
 The oData access is available to client tools supporting UNX universes
•
•
•
•
•
Crystal Report Enterprise
Web Intelligence
Dashboard
Explorer
Mobi

19. New Universe Consumption SDK
 Beyond BI 4.1 - Open universe semantic layer
consumption
 Universe Consumption SDK will allow partners to:
•
•
•
Build custom Universe query panel and embed it
anywhere
Expose Universe metadata within custom
application
Integrate Universe queries directly into custom
applications
 Architecture
•
•
SDK sends Universe query request as XML to BI
platform
Application receives query data back in oData
format

20. Platforms we consider beyond Data


Browsers (Internet Explorer, FireFox, Chrome, Safari)

Application Servers (Jboss, NetWeaver, Tomcat,
WebLogic, WebSphere)

Portal Servers (Netweaver Enterprise Portal, WebLogic
Portal, WebSphere Portal, Sharepoint)

LDAP (Tivoli, AD, eDirectory, Internet Directory, Sun
Java System Directory)

Reverse Proxy

20
Operating Systems (Windows, RedHat, SUSE, AIX,
Solaris)
Server/Desktop Virtualization

21. How we evaluate and Expand our sources




Customer Demand
Market Share of solution
Analyst opinions
Emerging Industry trends





21
Big Data
Social
Sentiment Analysis
Web based data
SaaS and Cloud data

22. Future Considerations
Connect to social, ‘big’ and web based data
HP Vertica
Google Big Query
Amazon RedShift
Cloudera Impala
22

23. Thank you for participating.
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