SAP launches BI OnDemand tool to consumerise business intelligence

SAP has launched a version of its BusinessObjects business intelligence product as a cloud-based service, designed to offer detailed, real-time data analysis in a timely, cost-effective and user-friendly manner.

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence OnDemand, launched at the firm's TechEd conference in Bangalore on Wednesday, is powered by SAP's High Performance Analytic Appliance (Hana) platform.

Hana, which was unveiled earlier this year, takes advantage of in-memory computing to deliver faster data analytics on-the-fly by analysing huge amounts of data in real time, removing the need to define data models ahead of time.

As a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering, BusinessObjects BI OnDemand can be set-up quickly and data imported rapidly, reducing the costly problems of implementation and maintenance that usually plague such projects, said SAP.

"With SAP BusinessObjects BI OnDemand on SAP HANA, we are bringing real-time analytics with the breakthrough capabilities of SAP HANA – enabling complex analyses, plans and simulations on real-time data – together with lower TCO, rapid time-to-value and beautiful end user experience of on-demand applications," said Vishal Sikka, member of the SAP Executive Board.

"This is one more example of how we are bringing the power of SAP HANA to every aspect of our existing products, in addition to the entirely new applications we are building."

Ovum analyst Surya Mukherjee welcomed the announcement, arguing that the service effectively "consumerises BI" by making it easier to upload data from various sources, manage it and open it up for analysis.

"Delivering all these capabilities through the cloud helps remove the infrastructure and provisioning aspects out of the picture, while still adhering to organisational security standards," he added.

"This can be truly beneficial to business users who can start creating new reports without IT supervision, and also take a lot of burden off IT staff. The cloud deployment model uses the SAP Hana platform in the background which loads the data in-memory and ensures rapid processing of queries ‘at the speed of thought'."

He cautioned, however, that the service had not been designed to perform "extensive data management", adding that firms would still need to carry out most of their BI heavy-lifting on premise.

SAP will be hoping the SaaS offering appeals to its customers at a time when it appears many are confused with the firm's cloud strategy.

A new survey from the SAP User Group revealed that over half of its customers believed there to be a lack of clarity over SAP's cloud roadmap, while over a quarter didn't even know what the German software giant's cloud offerings were.