SAP and Business Intelligence: Simple Stuff, Really Simple
May 14, 2015
I came across an interesting summary of SAP’s business intelligence approach. Navigate to “SAP BI Suite Roadmap Strategy Update from ASUG SapphireNow.” ASUG, in case you are not into the SAP world, means America’s SAP User Group. Doesn’t everyone know that acronym? I did not.
The article begins with a legal disclaimer, always a strange attractor to me. I find content on the Web which includes unreadable legal lingo sort of exciting.
It is almost as thrilling as some of the security methods which SAP employs across its systems and software. I learned from a former SAP advisor that SAP was, as I recall the comment, “Security has never been a priority at SAP.”
The other interesting thing about the article is that it appears to be composed of images captured either from a low resolution screen capture program or a digital camera without a massive megapixel capability.
I worked through the slides and comments as best as I could. I noted several points in addition to the aforementioned lacunae regarding security; to wit:
- SAP wants to simplify the analytics landscape. This is a noble goal, but my experience has been that SAP is a pretty complex beastie. That may be my own ignorance coloring what is just an intuitive, tightly integrated example of enterprise software.
- SAP likes dedicating servers or clusters of servers to tasks. There is a server for the in memory database. There is a server for what I think used to be Business Objects. There is the SAP desktop. There are edge servers in case your SAP installation is not for a single user. There is the SAP cloud which, I assume, is an all purpose solution to computational and storage bottlenecks. Lots of servers.
- Business Objects is the business intelligence engine. I am not confident in my assessment of complexity, but, as I recall, Business Objects can be a challenge.
My reaction to the presentation is that for the faithful who owe their job and their consulting revenue to SAP’s simplified business intelligence solutions and servers, joy suffuses their happy selves.
For me, I keep wondering about security. And whatever happened to TREX? What happened to Inxight’s Thingfinder and related server technologies?
How simple can an enterprise solution be? Obviously really simple. Did I mention security?
Stephen E Arnold, May 14, 2015
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