Business Intelligence Software Vendors - SAP

SAP - BI Solutions

With almost 13,000 deployments, SAP has been remarkably successful in getting its customers to embrace NetWeaver BI. The stability and consistency of SAP's organization and product development plans contribute to its viability as a BI platform. SAP is also in a good position to make BI more pervasive by embedding analytical components within the NetWeaver business process platform. As a result, SAP has the highest score for ability to execute of all the competitors in the BI platform market.

However, almost all SAP BI deployments happen in heavy SAP R/3 and mySAP application environments. While most NetWeaver BI implementations import some non-SAP application data, SAP can point to only a couple of dozen large sites using NetWeaver BI without a dominant SAP application focus. To become a leader, SAP needs to demonstrate that it can succeed as a BI platform consistently in non-SAP application-centric environments. Its latest release, SAP NetWeaver 2004s, does improve its ease of use and its ability to query distributed data sources, but few customers have yet to use these capabilities in production. SAP's focus during the past 12 months has been mostly on the infrastructure side of BI.

With the availability of the Business Intelligence Accelerator (BIA) — an appliance-based performance booster and intelligent cache of the data warehouse platform — SAP has addressed regularly voiced concerns about the scalability and performance of the Business Information Warehouse (BW) platform, and has been innovative by being the first large BI platform vendor to embrace in-memory analysis.

Finally, SAP's BI front-end strategy still needs to demonstrate traction. Customer satisfaction will continue to be an issue unless SAP improves the flexibility of the NetWeaver BI infrastructure to make it more efficient for not only experienced developers, but also end users to customize, access and evolve their BI applications. SAP NetWeaver BI customers rely much more heavily on their internal IT organization than other BI platform vendors that have demonstrated more self-service BI implementations.

Source: http://mediaproducts.gartner.com/reprints/oracle/145507.html