New SAP BI Packages Offer Bundled Data Warehouse Capabilities

business intelligence software

The move, according to channel partners, will provide small and midsize businesses with a more cost-effective way to implement data warehouse systems that can handle "big data."

"It just opens up the door to much faster access to their underlying data," said Mahesh Desai, president of Kingfisher Inc., an Atlanta-based solution provider that focuses on business analytics. Kingfisher is an SAP gold partner and resells SAP BusinessObjects software.

Related: Big Data Demands: The Heightened Need For Advanced Data Visualization

The new "analytics editions" of the BusinessObjects software also can be more easily tailored for specific industries and lines of business, SAP said.

"As technologies such as BI, data warehousing and data integration continue to come together, organizations large and small are looking for end-to-end solutions that can turn 'big data' into 'intelligent data' and quickly answer any business question," said John Schweitzer, SAP senior vice president and general manager of analytics, in a statement. "The analytics editions take this even further by offering the expert content they need to accelerate return on investment."

The new packages include SAP BusinessObjects BI Suite, analytics edition; SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform, analytics edition; SAP BusinessObjects BI, Edge analytics edition; and SAP Crystal Server, analytics edition.

Those packages include run-time licenses for the SAP Sybase IQ server, the company's Sybase database optimized for data warehouse systems; and the SAP Data Integrator software for collecting data from disparate systems and transforming it for analysis.

"They've really added the whole warehousing run-time capabilities," Desai said in an interview. That "makes it incredibly easier" for small and midsize businesses to build a data warehouse system. That creates opportunities for his company to help existing customers expand their BI systems, he said, and sell to new customers who otherwise didn't have the budget to implement data warehouse systems.

PUBLISHED SEPT. 24, 2012