Short session example of a one-day workshop seminar

1. Architectural Options
Presented By David Dixon
SAP Research and Advisory Center
INFORTE, A Business & Decision Company
david.dixon@inforte.com
10:30 AM – 11:00 AM
November 17, 2008

2. Overall Agenda
Agenda
9:00 AM – 9:45 AM –SAP-Business Objects Integrated Roadmap for BI
9:45 AM – 10:15 AM – High Level Demo of BusinessObjects EQRA Package
for SAP
10:15 AM – 10:30 AM – Intel Presentation
10:30 AM – 11:00 AM – Architecture Options
11:00 AM – 11:15 AM – Break
11:15 AM – 12:00 PM – Architecture Options (continued)
12:00 PM – 1:00 PM – Lunch
1:00 PM – 2:00 PM – Ad Hoc Reporting and Analysis
2:00 PM – 2:45 PM – Data Integration and Management
2:45 PM – 3:45 PM – Dashboards and Publishing
3:45-4:00 PM – Discussion and Wrap-Up
© 2008 Inforte Corporation. All Rights Reserved. 2

3. Session Agenda
Agenda
How Does Business Objects Change Your BI Capabilities?
What Does Business Objects Mean to Your Landscape?
What are the SAP Architectural Implications?
© 2008 Inforte Corporation. All Rights Reserved. 3

4. What You Get With SAP
While doing their jobs, native SAP tools sometimes constrained business
intelligence because of their SAP and engineering-centric approaches
SAP BW BEx Query Designer ABAP Programming SAP Reporting
Loading data
Printing
into BW
© 2008 Inforte Corporation. All Rights Reserved. 4
Source: SAP

5. What You Get with Business Objects
“BI for the masses” becomes more pragmatic as ease-of-use helps reach a
wider audience, and openness enables more compelling content
Flexible, Traceable
Pervasive
Any Data Source
Simple, Self- Presentation
Service -Ready
Reporting Information
© 2008 Inforte Corporation. All Rights Reserved. 5
Source: SAP

6. How Business Objects Fits With SAP
BI Platform
Information Enterprise
Discovery & Information
Delivery Management
Data
Reporting Analysis Publishing Data Integration
Warehousing
Crystal Web SAP
Live Office Data Services
Reports Intelligence NetWeaver BI
Dashboarding Mobile Data Federator
Polestar SAP MDM
Business Objects is
Xcelsius Voyager
the new way
forward for getting
Dashboard
Builder
data in and out of
SAP data
BI Widgets
warehousing
Source: SAP

7. Ad Hoc Reporting and Analysis Session
BI Platform
Information Enterprise
Discovery & Information
Delivery Management
Data
Reporting Analysis Publishing Data Integration
Warehousing
Crystal Web SAP
Live Office Data Services
Reports Intelligence NetWeaver BI
Dashboarding Mobile Data Federator
Polestar SAP MDM
Xcelsius Voyager
Dashboard
Builder
BI Widgets
Source: SAP

8. Data Integration and Management Session
BI Platform
Information Enterprise
Discovery & Information
Delivery Management
Data
Reporting Analysis Publishing Data Integration
Warehousing
Crystal Web SAP
Live Office Data Services
Reports Intelligence NetWeaver BI
Dashboarding Mobile Data Federator
Voyager SAP MDM
Xcelsius Polestar
Dashboard
Builder
BI Widgets
Source: SAP

9. Dashboards and Publishing Session
BI Platform
Information Enterprise
Discovery & Information
Delivery Management
Data
Reporting Analysis Publishing Data Integration
Warehousing
Crystal Web SAP
Live Office Data Services
Reports Intelligence NetWeaver BI
Dashboarding Mobile Data Federator
Polestar SAP MDM
Xcelsius Voyager
Dashboard
Builder
BI Widgets
Source: SAP

10. Session Agenda
Agenda
How Does Business Objects Change Your BI Capabilities?
What Does Business Objects Mean to Your Landscape?
What are the SAP Architectural Implications?
© 2008 Inforte Corporation. All Rights Reserved. 10

11. Think of Business Objects as an “Add-On” to SAP
For business units and departments, this is an opportunity to own a
piece of the BI landscape without SAP skills
BusinessObjects
Enterprise
Front-End-Centric
BI Platform
SAP NetWeaver BI
Back-End-Centric
BI Platform
BusinessObjects
Data Services
Data Integration
and Data Quality
SAP ERP
Business
Application
© 2008 Inforte Corporation. All Rights Reserved. 11

12. How the New Landscape Impacts You
• Installation, configuration, administration, and monitoring activities are different
• Business Objects has separate repositories, databases, and servers from your
existing SAP environment helping to maintain its openness and independence
• Opportunities for decentralizing control of Business Intelligence
– While SAP is your centralized enterprise data repository, how you get data in
and out of SAP is now opened up technologically and organizationally
SAP Business
Objects
© 2008 Inforte Corporation. All Rights Reserved. 12

13. Do You Have to Upgrade?
• From a BOBJ perspective, the answer is “yes” if you are not on the BO XI Platform
– XI 3.0 delivers improved performance with the SAP integration
• From an SAP perspective, the answer is “no” if you are on SAP BW 3.0 or above:
– The BusinessObjects environment works as an add-on to the existing SAP
landscape
– The Business Objects integration with SAP has a history that dates back to the 3.x
technology
– The current release was both tested on 3.5 and 7.0
– BusinessObjects Data Services works with 3.x InfoSources instead of the new 7.0
DataSources
• There are three main reasons to upgrade:
1. BI Accelerator to enable self-service
2. Enhancement Pack 1 to leverage new SAP integration such as Polestar and Data
Federator
3. Data Transfer Processes to streamline data flows
© 2008 Inforte Corporation. All Rights Reserved. 13

14. So, What Should You Do?
• The new Business Objects offering will fully leverage the SAP NetWeaver
data warehouse (BW), so there’s no reason to disrupt current data
warehouse projects
• Don’t abandon your current SAP NetWeaver BI investments unless you
have a solid business case to take advantage of new BusinessObjects
functionality and features
– You are not being forced down the path of “rip-and-replace”, but
rather being given an opportunity to “adopt-and-adapt”
• If you’re running SAP BW 3.x …
– You’ll technically be able to run
BusinessObjects XI 3.0, but it is strongly
advisable to migrate to 7.x in order to
leverage future enhancements (and BI Accelerator)
© 2008 Inforte Corporation. All Rights Reserved. 14

15. Session Agenda
Agenda
How Does Business Objects Change Your BI Capabilities?
What Does Business Objects Mean to Your Landscape?
What are the SAP Architectural Implications?
© 2008 Inforte Corporation. All Rights Reserved. 15

16. How Business Objects Tools Protect Your Work
© 2008 Inforte Corporation. All Rights Reserved. 16

17. What SAP’s Three-Tier Architecture Means to You
• Data modeling in a three-tiered SAP NetWeaver BI system

18. How Universes Work
RDBMS databases
Web Intelligence Objects Universe
OLAP databases
Data
Federator
and Rapid
Marts
Personal Files (i.e.,
spreadsheets,
Access databases)
The figure above illustrates how a Universe directly connects to a data
source. The Universe Designer uses the structures from the data source
to create objects, which in turn are accessed by tool authors

19. OLAP vs. Relational Universes – Know the difference!
• Relational Universes are made up of schemas
– Schemas are based on tables and joins that are required to return
data for analysis and reporting
– Normalization and aggregate-awareness logic
• OLAP Universes do not have a schemas!
– Multiple sources, joins and aggregate awareness are not possible
– However, WebI Queries can merge multiple universes and take and
advantage of OLAP drilldown via a “query drill mode” option

20. Layer Cake or Flexible Architecture?
SAP Data Connectivity Options
Xcelsius
Live Office
WebI
QaaWS
OLAP Universe
Universe Crystal Voyager Lines of
Governance?
BEx Query
Virtual Provider*
InfoCubes BI Accelerator
Crystal
DataStore Objects
Crystal
SAP ERP
* Best Practice Design Option

21. Business Objects Universes and SAP Architectural Impacts
SAP Data Connectivity Options
Xcelsius
Live Office
WebI
QaaWS
Universe Universe Crystal Voyager
BEx Query
Relational OLAP
Data Federator Virtual Provider*
InfoCubes BI Accelerator
Crystal
DataStore Objects
Crystal
SAP ERP
* Best Practice Design Option

22. But Which BI Tool Should I Pick?
• Customize this
decision tree to fit
your organization
• Decision tree criteria
and guidelines should
be focused on the job
at hand
• Technical interface
and deployment
options (i.e., Web vs.
desktop) should be
seen as job-at-hand
criteria in disguise
© 2008 Inforte Corporation. All Rights Reserved. 22

23. Conclusion
“The Customer Can Have Any Color He Wants So Long As It's Black”
-- Henry Ford, in reference to his Model-T Car
• SAP users are no longer constrained to SAP-centric reporting tools and Excel add-ins
for information discovery and delivery
• The BI community in SAP environments now have a lot of specialized choices within
reporting and analysis – the trick is to weave them together as part of an integrated
platform
• There is now specialized tools for almost every job at hand within the context of
where the work gets done (MS office, desktop, web, mobile, etc)
• Choose from the portfolio of tools based on a decision tree that is focused on what
the job at hand is trying to achieve
• Recommend to upgrading Business Objects to the latest release in order to extract
the most value out of the SAP Integration
© 2008 Inforte Corporation. All Rights Reserved. 23