With its latest release of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) and Enterprise Information Suite (EIM), SAP says it is targeting the challenge of increasing globalization, virtual organisations, mobile technology and social networks.
"Historically, companies have dealt with BI on a project-by-project basis, separate from each other and from their EIM initiatives, lacking the ability to bring that data together," said Carl W. Olofson, research vice president, Application Development and Deployment, IDC. "The latest BI and EIM solutions from SAP are designed to help tackle big data, integrating structured and unstructured data and even information from social networks."
New features of the 4.0 releases of BI and EIM solutions include; Real-time in-memory computing – which SAP says is “Lightning-fast on massively high volumes of data” and mobile BI on any device – so that workers can access real-time BI and respond instantly to events as they unfold.
The 4.0 releases capitalise on SAP's acquisition of Sybase, and will use the Sybase “Unwired Platform” to offer a mobile BI suite that taps content from SAP and non-SAP business applications.
More interestingly, or worryingly (depending on your point of view) deeper text analysis will allow users to “complement traditional business insight with the thoughts and sentiment that people express in social media streams, blogs and e-mail”. People can now monitor, analyze, explore, report and act with confidence in the accuracy of not only their transactional data but also with full insight into the trends and sentiments expressed in unstructured content of blogs, e-mail and social media streams.
