SAP Adds Analytics to BusinessObjects Suite

Earlier this week SAP debuted Feature Pack 3 for the 4.0 version of its BusinessObjects business intelligence suite, as well as a new version of its Visual Intelligence tool, both of which are now generally available.

The release impacts "everything from our large enterprise offerings to our midmarket offering [the Edge edition]," says Jason Rose, vice president of solution marketing, business intelligence, at SAP. Rose adds that the innovations have been designed around the company's core BI platform and that it is also providing new self-service capabilities via the 1.0.1 version of its SAP Visual Intelligence tool.

Feature Pack 3 includes new capabilities in the following areas:

Mobile: The feature pack contains new support for analytics on iPhones and Android devices.
Big data: Support for the open-source Hadoop framework and deeper support for the SAP HANA platform enable large-scale data processing.
Insights: SAP BusinessObjects Explorer software lets users get immediate access to data to create visualizations and answer business questions on the fly, according to the company.
Social: Integration between the SAP StreamWork collaboration tool and BI documents allows sales executives and other users to share data more efficiently.
Integration: Deeper SAP application integration enables customers to run operational reporting off of the SAP ERP application and multisource universes.

SAP Visual Intelligence was first unveiled in May at the company's annual Sapphire user conference. A desktop version of the BusinessObjects Explorer software, Visual Intelligence is meant to give business users a way to easily probe data and create their own visualizations, regardless of their technical skill level. Version 1.0.1 of Visual Intelligence adds the ability to load data from Microsoft Excel and CSV files and an integration with StreamWork.

Last week SAP announced its best-ever second quarter results with software revenues surpassing €1 billion ($1.29 billion) and total revenue hitting €3.9 billion ($4.75 billion).