SAP's Google partnership adds mapping data to business intelligence

SAP and Google have announced a partnership which will see the latter's location-based data integrated tightly into SAP's analytics software to broaden and improve the business insight available to users through the tools.

The integration of Google Maps and Google Earth is already a feature in SAP's StreamWork collaboration product and BusinessObjects Explorer iOS application, but is expected to be rolled out more broadly by SAP in Q4 2011.

The tie-up is designed to give SAP users a geospatial context to their business intelligence applications to improve decision making.

Customers can take their enterprise information, plot it out on Google Maps and then perform detailed analytics against the information to understand the regional and local implications of that data, SAP explained in a video accompanying the announcement.

"We're seeing a big trend where corporate data is more and more tagged with geospatial information that really lends itself well to the intuitive interfaces of Google Maps and Google Earth," the firm added.

"This collaboration will arm customers with an intuitive way to visualise, analyse and manage big data by Google's dynamic, interactive map, satellite and street level views."

The move to partner with Google could be a canny one by the German software company whose products in the past have been criticised for lacking the usability and accessibility which is taken for granted in the consumer software world.

It may even boost take up of the BusinessObjects product portfolio, which has been struggling since the firm was bought by SAP nearly four years ago.

Only seven per cent of SAP customers use BusinessObjects, according to new figures released on Monday by the SAP UK & Ireland User Group.