Analysis of Business Intelligence Platforms and Vendors - SAP - Assignment Example

Running Head: B.I. PLATFORMS ANALYSIS OF BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE PLATFORMS AND VENDORS NAME DATE B.I. PLATFORMS A. Read the research paper and answer the following questions: There are a number of vendors listed in the MQ. Select one vendor from the High Ability to Execute/Low Completeness of Vision quadrant and write two paragraphs about their BI products. SAP has its headquartered in Waldorf, Germany but has a presence in all parts of the world. The company is a market leader in enterprise application software which when used in companies of different sizes from all industries enables the companies to be more efficient. The software help in running all aspects of the company from front office, back office, warehouse to storefront. The Business Intelligence software from this company has so far been adopted by over 230, 000 customers. The products have been used in areas as diverse as the Management of Mumbai City in India, the software helps ensure that essential services are delivered to the city population of over 20 million people. It is also being used by oncologists in Berlin’s Charite Hospital to analyze data related from cancer patients; this enables the oncologists to find the correct treatments for patients much faster than if the work was done using traditional means. It has also been used in Koehler Paper where SAP HANA, an in-memory computing platform which helps the company which is family run to foresee the market trends and makes decisions accordingly (SAP). Business intelligence products from SAP include SAP Business Objects 4.0 This product helps organizations of different sizes and industries to manage and analyze increasing quantity of data and use that information to improve the performance of business. The application of IT in businesses leads to a problem of high costs due to the need to purchase and maintain hardware that is capable of handling large amounts of data, SAP Business Objects is designed to , as much as possible, be compatible with the hardware available in the market. While business users need quick, often real-time access to analyze this information in order to respond to ever changing market conditions. New data warehousing solutions from SAP address this issue by providing real-time access to big data in a uniquely efficient and affordable manner. SAP HANA™ Appliance Software High-performance SAP HANA™ appliance software allows organizations to analyze large volumes of operations data and get immediate answers to business questions. Business users can instantly explore and analyze all of their transactional and analytical data from virtually any data source in real time. And when managing large data volumes, SAP HANA is also simpler and more cost-effective to operate and manage compared to traditional disk-based data warehousing systems. Sybase® IQ Sybase® IQ software is a highly optimized analytics server designed specifically to deliver superior performance for mission-critical business intelligence, analytics, and data warehousing solutions on any standard hardware and operating system. The pioneering column-based architecture in Sybase IQ has been proven in the most challenging real-world reporting and analytic workloads. It effectively handles large volumes of ad hoc queries and hundreds of concurrent users, often increasing conventional query performance by 5, 10, and even 100 times. Its data compression algorithms reduce data storage volumes by more than 70%, while superior manageability routinely reduces administrative costs by 75% (SAP). List and explain each of the criteria must a vendor meet in order to be listed in the BI Platform Magic Quadrant? In order for a vendor to be included in the Magic Quadrant, they must generate at least $ 15 Million in Business Intelligence software license per year. This is meant to show that the vendor is a serious player and has the ability to research and understand the needs of the market. Ability to raise this amount of revenue also shows that the vendor is able to adapt to changes in the market, thus deserving the rating According to Gartner, total software revenue is revenue that comes from appliances, new licenses, updates, subscriptions and hosting, technical support, and maintenance. This means that the said total software revenue excludes hardware and software based revenues. Another requirement is for the vendors to deliver 10-15 capabilities which are outlined in the market which are explained predetermined for the purpose of the research, these capabilities change from time to time depending on changes in the market. A company’s ability to deliver the capabilities portrays it as having the necessary scope and therefore sufficiently rounded to make the cut for the inclusion There must also be at least thirty customers who have procured and used the vendor’s platforms who respond to the survey. Such a number of customers provides a good enough sample to enable evaluators to make a decision regarding the company one way or the other. Judgment of vendors is done on their basis to turn a vision into a reality in the market. The perceptions of customers regarding the strengths and weaknesses of the vendors BI products and the market share of the product in order for competitiveness of the vendor’s project to be gauged. The state of the organization finances is also gauged in order to know whether the organization has the viability to keep making investment to develop BI products that meet customer needs even as the market continues evolving. There is also the question of how the product has been priced especially on matters of licensing and maintenance since these are imperative in ensuring that the product is used at all levels of organizational ability in terms of financing. The vendor’s ability to change according to the demands of the market is another important criterion in making a determination of who will join the quadrant. A company should have sufficient flexibility to handle the rapidly changing customer needs in the technology market. This often means that there will be newer, improved versions of the platform that help old customers respond to market changes without having to go through the cost of changing the entire platform (Kurt et al., 2013). The authors suggest there are a number of capabilities that a BI platform should deliver. Give an explanation and example for each of these The capabilities that a BI platform should deliver are subdivided into three categories namely integration, information delivery and analysis. Collaboration is one of the capabilities which falls under the category of integration. Through it, the people using a BI platform are able to share information and also discuss the information with a view of solving programs for the benefit of the organization (Luhn, 1958; Ross et al., 2006). Collaborative interaction is usually supported by integrated instant messaging and email interfaces to applications such as Microsoft Office, Google Docs and Lotus Notes, which are part of the office environment. Several BI vendors also enable BI results to be integrated into collaboration platforms; that extends the BI environment with content management, search and other collaborative features. In addition, BI vendors may interface to social media sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube. That can indirectly add social computing capabilities, such as communities and user profiles, to BI systems.  The application suites in the office environment include email systems, word processors, spreadsheets, presentation tools and personal databases; in some cases, they also feature on-premises and cloud-based tools for social computing. These applications are most commonly used to share BI findings and communicate about them, including with users who don’t have direct access to BI systems. But Office and rival products can also be used to enhance the content and context of reports and query results through the addition of comments, external information and expert opinions (Rud, 2009).  The other category of capabilities concerns information delivery which has to do with the platform’s ability to report the information gathered to all interested parties. An example of a capability falling under mobile BI is mobile business intelligence which helps the members of staff on the move to analyze information in the field and make appropriate decisions. This mobile computing uses smartphones. BI applications can be either custom coded, fixed form or graphical tool developed. The third category of BI capabilities is the ability to analyze; this is normally done using online analytical processing (OLAP) which makes it possible for the user to analyze the data quickly. An example of a capability under this category is predictive modeling and data mining. This can be done using spreadsheets like MS Excel. This plays a critical role in insurance where it is used by actuaries to improve decision making. B. You will now need to conduct some further research in order to report on the following; search the web for several other of the vendors (you do not need to present this research, it is for background purposes for you) represented in the BI Platform Magic Quadrant, in particular noting their BI platform offerings. In light of your research into the BI Platform capabilities, assess two of these vendors’ BI platforms against those capabilities. A starting point for each of the capabilities might be: i. Does the platform include the capability? Actuate produces BIRT platform which has a great capacity to analyze data and produce reports. This is because the platform has a visual report designer as well as a runtime section for generating reports to be used in any Java environment. It also has the capacity to make charts as a part of the reports or separately as the case might demand. Give a description of how the platform provides the capability. Arcplan has a platform referred to as Arcplan Enterprise which is one of the most flexible platforms in terms of producing reports dashboards, dashboards and forecasts. Arcplan offers free trial versions for the software (Hague, 2008). i. Create a table that compares the two vendors’ platforms against each other that could be used by someone in order to decide which platform to adopt. BIRT ArcPlan Enterprise Reporting Good Good Flexibility Good Excellent Free trial No Yes Analytic features OLAP Trend Indicators References Bappoo, Paul ( 2010). BIRT for Beginners (1st ed.). Lulu. p. 241. ISBN 978-1-4457-4886-3.  Hague, Nola; Tatchell, Jane ( 2008). BIRT: A Field Guide to Reporting (2nd ed.). Addison-Wesley Professional. p. 794. ISBN 0-321-58027-3.  H P Luhn (1958). "A Business Intelligence System". IBM Journal 2 (4): 314. doi:10.1147/rd.24.0314. Jeanne W. Ross, Peter Weil, David C. Robertson (2006) "Enterprise Architecture As Strategy", ISBN 1-59139-839-8. Kurt Schlegel, Rita L. Sallam, Daniel Yuen, Joao Tapadinhas (2013), Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence andAnalytics Platforms. Gartner. Rud, Olivia (2009). Business Intelligence Success Factors: Tools for Aligning Your Business in the Global Economy. Hoboken, N.J: Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-0-470-39240-9. )   Read More