SAP BusinessObjects Edge Business Intelligence (BI) is a powerful business intelligence choice for midsize companies that want to improve business processes, discover new opportunities, and gain a competitive advantage. This comprehensive, versatile midmarket suite delivers solutions that address any business intelligence requirement – from flexible ad hoc reporting and analysis, to dashboards and visualization, to powerful data integration and quality as well as prepackaged data mart solutions.
SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI brings together the simplicity and speed of search with the trust and analytical power of BI to provide immediate answers to your business questions. Your users can leverage familiar keyword searches to find information hidden in data sources, then navigate and explore directly on data – without the need for existing reports or metrics.
Through the pre-packaging of SAP BusinessObjects Explorer, your end users benefit from easy-to-use search capabilities that can enable them to do the following:
Enter a few search keywords and view and explore results via an exploration panel;Auto-generate charts for optimal results; Share results via e-mail and other familiar formats. SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI Standard Package
Backed by our enterprise intelligence platform, the SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI standard package offers you the latest technology innovations and delivers a connected, interactive, and open business intelligence solution. And that means you can leverage the same insight into your business data as the big guys do – with a level of investment appropriate to your company's size. With the BusinessObjects Edge standard package, you can utilize the industry standard in operational and financial reporting, as well as ad hoc reporting capabilities and world-class visualization technology – empowering every business user within your organization to make informed decisions.
SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI with Data Integration
SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI is also available with data integration. With this version, you can benefit from all the functionality of SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI standard package – plus features that enable you to combine data from multiple sources; populate a data warehouse expediently; and leverage ad hoc, advanced, and drilldown analysis.
SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI with Data Management
SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI also offers a version with data management, which combines all the capabilities of the SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI standard package and the SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI with data integration version – and adds powerful functionality for data parsing, cleansing, and address synching within the data integration environment. You can benefit from prepackaged data quality functionality that can be deployed quickly, enabling you to ensure data quality throughout the data integration process. The result? Your users gain greater confidence in the reliability of data – and can make more informed decisions.
In addition, SAP BusinessObjects Rapid Marts packages – add-ons to the SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI version that includes data management – can deliver data integration best practices in prebuilt data models, transformation logic, and data extraction for SAP and several other business management solutions. When you leverage these powerful packages, you gain our extensive experience working directly with business management software customers – customers like you – to deliver faster, easier, and more flexible BI solutions.
- Source SAP
In today's increasingly global and competitive business environment, you must plan faster and do more – often with less budget and fewer resources. At the same time, you must be incredibly efficient and precise with every decision, while complying with regulatory requirements. Everyone in your organization needs access to the right information at the right time in order to gain a competitive edge and ensure greater control of business operations.
To succeed, you need to close the gap between strategy and operational execution by cascading corporate goals down into department-relevant metrics; ensuring accountability; enabling intuitive modeling, monitoring, and analysis; and streamlining execution of strategy-guided plans.
Drive Financial and Operational Performance
SAP BusinessObjects enterprise performance management solutions can help your company capitalize on the value of your existing data assets. With these solutions, your organization can become more agile – gaining organizational alignment, visibility, and confidence that give you optimal control and competitive advantage. These solutions can integrate with SAP Business Suite applications; SAP BusinessObjects governance, risk, and compliance solutions; SAP BusinessObjects business intelligence solutions; and SAP BusinessObjects information management solutions. As a result, you can maximize business profitability, manage risk and compliance, and optimize corporate systems, people, and processes.
SAP BusinessObjects enterprise performance management solutions offer comprehensive functionality for:
Strategy management – Set your goals, map your strategies, and then monitor and manage performance from high-level objectives down to operational metrics.
Planning and consolidation – Increase accuracy in planning at every level in your organization, while reducing budget cycles and associated costs. Accelerate and improve your financial and management reporting and decision making.
Financial consolidation – Complete your financial consolidation and reporting cycles faster – with complete confidence in your data.
XBRL publishing – Simplify and accelerate the preparation of XBRL documents to communicate financial and business data.
Financial information management – Leverage powerful connectivity, mapping, and loading functionality designed for business users.
Intercompany reconciliation – Accelerate your close by enabling your business units to debate and reconcile balances directly with one another and eliminate delays at the corporate and divisional levels.
Profitability and cost management – Identify the causes of underperformance, and take action to reduce costs and optimize profitability across dimensions such as product, customer, and channel.
Spend performance management – Maximize cost savings and reduce supplier risk by gaining continuous visibility into company-wide spending patterns, savings potential, and external market factors.
Supply chain performance management – Measurably improve supply chain effectiveness by focusing on actionable, operational process metrics that impact supply chain performance.
-Source SAP
For effective decision making, your business users require quick, easy answers to off-the-cuff questions and a better understanding of your business, without extensive training and dependence on IT. Even more important, your users need fast access to relevant, decision-quality information anywhere in the enterprise. But that can be a tall order, as traditional business intelligence tools typically require a deep understanding of data structures or knowledge of how to build a query in order to ask interactive questions or generate ad hoc reports.
What's more, your IT team is being pulled in a million directions – facing an unmanageable workload, being asked to do more with less in an environment with rapidly changing business priorities.
SAP can help.
SAP BusinessObjects Explorer software, accelerated version for SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse (SAP NetWeaver BW), combines intuitive information search and exploration functionality with the high performance and scalability of SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator, so you can empower your organization and extend the reach of BI to all of your business users. With immediate insights into vast amounts of data, your users can explore business at the speed of thought – and improve their ability to make sound, timely decisions.
SAP BusinessObjects Explorer, accelerated version delivers powerful functionality that includes:
Search across data fields and metadata – Users simply enter a few keywords to find the most relevant information instantly from across all data sources – without requiring previous knowledge about what data exists or where to find it.
Intuitive exploration of data and charts – The software complements results with contextually relevant details. The experience is comparable to Internet-style search and browsing an online store. Users don't need data model or data knowledge.
Automated relevancy and chart generation – SAP BusinessObjects Explorer, accelerated version presents the most relevant search results first and automatically generates the chart that best represents the information.
High performance and scalability – The combined software and hardware solution delivers the high performance and scalability you need to get immediate response and answers as you browse through very large data sets – up to billions of data records.
As a result, you can ensure all your business users have easy access to all the information they need to make confident decisions based on up-to-date, reliable information.
-Source SAP
With software from SAP BusinessObjects you can leverage powerful data integration capabilities that enable you to:
1. Access all types of structured and unstructured data from virtually any source, from databases to Web forums
2. Integrate and deliver data in real-time or batch using flexible approaches through data federation or extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL)
3. Improve data quality with the ability to profile, cleanse, and match data during the ETL process
The following software from SAP BusinessObjects can help you achieve these objectives:
SAP BusinessObjects Data Integrator – Provides a subset of the data services functionality that allows you to access, integrate, transform, and deliver trusted data.
SAP BusinessObjects Data Federator – Creates a real tiime, unified view of your data sources with virtual data integration
SAP BusinessObjects Rapid Marts packages – Accelerate the deployment of your analytic projects with pre-built data integration solutions that sources data from over 33 application modules from SAP and Oracle (includes Siebel and PeopleSoft)
SAP BusinessObjects Text Analysis – Read and extract information previously locked in unstructured data sources for a complete view of your customer, market, competitors, and business.
-Source SAP
The SAP BusinessObjects Live Office application integrates with Microsoft Office, embedding up-to-the-minute corporate data in Microsoft PowerPoint, Excel, and Word documents. This releases you from your dependency on IT and provides self-service access to your trusted business intelligence (BI) within your familiar business tools.
With SAP BusinessObjects Live Office, you can:
Get self-service access to corporate data – Within Microsoft Office, you can use intuitive wizards and toolbars to select data easily from Crystal Rreports, SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence, or via ad hoc data selections – all within out depending on IT.
Increase confidence in your data accuracy – Leverage credible, IT-verified data with instant refresh functionality, so you have the most accurate, up-to-date data at your fingertips.
Securely share relevant documents – Publish live Microsoft Office documents to SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise, making it easier for you to share documents with your coworkers. You can also embed BI directly in your e-mails messages using Microsoft Outlook.
-Source SAP
SAP BusinessObjects Mobile allows you to remotely access your favorite business intelligence (BI) reports, metrics, and right-time data with a single click of your wireless device. With SAP BusinessObjects Mobile, you can leverage the same BI content you work with everyday on your desktop – optimized for your mobile device. So your users can intuitively access, navigate, and analyze these familiar reports without a need for additional training.
With SAP BusinessObjects Mobile, management and information workers can stay up-to-date and make decisions using the latest information. Sales and field service staff can provide the right customer, product, and work order information where and when it's needed – helping shorten sales cycles and increase customer satisfaction.
SAP BusinessObjects Mobile supports a broad set of mobile devices including BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Symbian, and others.
-Source SAP
SAP BusinessObjects Polestar combines the simplicity and speed of search with the trust and analytical power of business intelligence (BI) to provide immediate answers to business questions. Users employ familiar keyword searches to find information and explore data directly. Polestar leverages the BI platform's universe metadata, security, trust and administration services – reducing IT backlog and making it deployable in days.
Product Benefits
With Polestar, you can:
Provide self-service business intelligence for all users
Get fast facts and answer investigative questions
Explore and understand new data sources and unexamined parts of the business
Eliminate the need to understand the data, where it's located or how it's structured
Ensure that information is secure, trustworthy and easily sharable
Deploy in days, not months
Fully leverage existing BI investments, including metadata, security and administrative services
Reduce IT and report author backlog
Technical Details
Version: SAP BusinessObjects XI R2 Data Sources: Operational applications, data warehouses, marts, RDBMS, OLAP servers and even unstructured sources recently processed via SAP BusinessObjects Text Analysis. Languages: English, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish
-Source SAP
Integration Option for Microsoft SharePoint Software aims to offer best of class integration with the SharePoint 2007 Portal. It enables SharePoint 2007 customers to perform all their Infoview requirements from within one interface. The target audience would include BusinessObjects Enterprise, Edge, and Crystal Reports Server administrators who would like to integrate their business intelligence content within their corporate .NET, SharePoint deployments.
Integration option for Microsoft SharePoint 1.0
Integration Kit to integrate content directly with your .NET based corporate portal. It provides business users with a personalized, single, secure view of corporate information.
The following kits are available for SharePoint:
BusinessObjects XI 3.1 SharePoint 2007 Portal Integration Kit
BusinessObjects XI 3.1 SharePoint 2003 Portal Integration Kit
BusinessObjects XI Release 2 SharePoint 2007 Portal Integration Kit
BusinessObjects XI Release 2 SharePoint 2003 Portal Integration Kit
BusinessObjects XI Release 1 SharePoint 2003 Portal Integration Kit
The following kits are available for Java:
BusinessObjects XI 3.1 Java Portal Integration Kit
BusinessObjects XI 3.0 Java Portal Integration Kit
BusinessObjects XI Release 2 Java Portal Integration Kit
BusinessObjects XI Release 2 JAAS Enablement Extensions
BusinessObjects XI Release 1 Java Portal Integration Kit
SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise software is a flexible and scalable information infrastructure that makes it easy for you to discover and share insight for optimal decision making. Built on a service-oriented architecture, the software offers an extensive set of solutions on a single platform – and enables IT departments to extend BI to any application or process in any environment.
With SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise, the BI software that empowers your organization to gain uncontestable insight essential to making cost-effective and profitable business decisions, you can:
Deliver the most extensive set of BI solutions on a single platform for better and faster decision making while requiring minimal IT dependence
Empower employees with visibility and self-service by providing a single place where users can find the relevant information they need to do their jobs
Reduce deployment- and maintenance-related costs by facilitating integration with your existing IT infrastructure and deploying BI applications for heterogeneous environments
Extend insight from BI to everyone by taking advantage of near-linear scalability and technological innovations such as built-in load balancing, caching services, and data sharing
Embed BI in any application or business process with comprehensive integration capabilities such as fine-grained software development kits and Web services.
-Source SAP
With SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence, both self-service access to data and intuitive information analysis are available in one product – helping your users turn business insights into effective decisions. With a few mouse clicks, users create a query from scratch, format the retrieved information, and easily analyze it to understand underlying trends and root causes. And if they don't require the full power of query capabilities, users can simply explore information in existing reports – formatting and interacting with data to meet specific needs.
Product Benefits
With SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence, you can make better decisions in less time by turning information into actionable insight at the speed of thought. SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence is built on our proven, mature business intelligence (BI) platform – SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise software – ensuring that your deployment meets performance demands and supports standardization efforts.
From improving corporate decision making to sharing information with customers, suppliers, and partners, SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence empowers your users with self-service information access and interactivity, while delivering:
Powerful, online and offline ad hoc query and reporting
Integrated and trusted analysis for all users
A tool built upon a complete, trusted, and agile BI platform.
-Source SAP
Xcelsius software illuminates your business by providing consolidated views of key metrics, so you can answer your business questions at-a-glance. Interact with your data like never before with what-if scenarios and other visual components – and use your data to make informed decisions.
With Xcelsius, you can:
Create dashboards for personal use – Xcelsius Engage gives you the power to transform complex data into a comprehensive dashboard. Create interactive dashboards from Microsoft Excel or a live data source, and export your dashboard to a familiar format – Microsoft Office, Flash (SWF) files, Adobe PDF, and Adobe AIR.
Create visually stunning and interactive presentations – Xcelsius Present is a powerful presentation tool that bridges the gap between static spreadsheets and the need for visual, interactive presentations. Bring Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to life with interactive charts and what-if scenarios – no training or programming is required.
-Source SAP
The release of SAP NetWeaver 7.1, marked the end of major enhancements to the SAP Business Explorer (SAP BEx) tools. Although these tools will continue to be supported under SAP’s maintenance policy, SAP’s strategic focus and development efforts will be placed on the Business Objects BI solutions. SAP is encouraging customers to adopt the Business Objects’ business intelligence platform to meet their needs for more sophisticated and strategic BI solutions.
Dashboards
SAP’s go-forward product for dashboarding is BusinessObjects Xcelsuis, together with BusinessObjects Dashboard Builder – a dashboard layout tool that complements BusinessObjects Xclesius in building out dashboard projects. After release 7.1 of SAP NetWeaver, the SAP BEx Web Application Designer will no longer be developed, although it will continue to be supported under maintenance.
Enterprise reporting
SAP’sproduct for formatted reporting going forward is now BusinessObjects Crystal Reports. BusinessObjects Crystal Reports is already tightly integrated with the SAP NetWeaver BI stack as well as with SAP Business Suite, allowing customers to unlock key data stored in these backend applications. Before the acquisition, SAP’s offering in the way of formatted reporting was the SAP BEx Report Designer. The last release of this tool will be shipped with SAP NetWeaver 7.1. SAP will continue to support the SAP BEx Report Designer under maintenance.
Ad-hoc query and reporting
With BusinessObjects Web Intelligence, SAP now offers a web-based ad-hoc query and reporting tool. Also, with the addition of BusinessObjects Polestar, SAP now offers customers simple and fast ‘Google-like’ search access to relevant data via an intuitive interface. Both of these tools are available as part of Business Objects’ business intelligence platform.
OLAP analysis
SAP’s offerings in this area are the SAP BEx Analyzer (Microsoft Excel-based) and SAP BEx Web Analyzer tools. Business Objects’ OLAP offering is BusinessObjects Voyager, which provides an intuitive user interface with seamless guided analysis. Integration of BusinessObjects Voyager and the two SAP OLAP tools has already begun, under the codename “Pioneer”.
The first version of this jointly developed product will combine the user interface of BusinessObjects Voyager with the OLAP capabilities of the SAP tools. “Pioneer” will be available for BusinessObjects Enterprise platform in 2010. SAP will continue to support SAP BEx Analyzer and SAP BEx Web Analyzer tools going forward as SAP NetWeaver base OLAP tools.
Data quality and master data management
SAP NetWeaver Master Data Management allows customers to consolidate and harmonize their master data within heterogeneous IT landscapes. BusinessObjects Data Quality allows them to identify, correct, and prevent data quality issues – to keep enterprise data consistent. The two tools are already loosely integrated; tighter integration is planned through 2010.
Extract, transform, load (ETL)
Business Objects offers SAP customers robust ETL capabilities with BuinsessObjects Data Integrator, which enables exploration, extraction, transformation, and delivery of data anywhere, at any frequency. It can be used by organizations for any small or large ETL project; for example, for loading non-SAP data into SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence.
SAP NetWeaver Visual Composer
SAP NetWeaver Visual Composer (SAP NetWeaver VC) will continue to be an integral part of SAP NetWeaver Composition Environment (SAP NetWeaver CE). SAP will continue to enhance SAP NetWeaver VC by allowing customers to embed business intelligence into business processes via composite applications. Furthermore, between 2009 and 2010, customers will be able to use SAP NetWeaver VC to embed and call BusinessObjects Crystal Reports, BusinessObjects Xcelsius, and the planned “Pioneer” product.
A single platform
The Business Objects BI solutions described above run on BusinessObjects Enterprise, a single integrated BI platform. The platform allows thousands of users – both inside and outside the company – to manage, distribute, and secure their reports, dashboards, and so on. Furthermore, this same BI platform directly leverages components of SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence, as well as SAP Business Suite applications. This, SAP and Business Objects insist, means that SAP customers should continue to build out their data warehousing and information management projects as usual.