New Features for SAP BO 4.0

While it was thought at one point that Web Intelligence would change its name to Interactive Analysis, it appears that it will keep its original name. But whatever what we want to call it, it has new features that will make you happy. To make your mouth water, here’s a preview of some features of SAP Business Objects 4.0 that will please every user.

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New Features for BO 4.0

1. BO Universe (semantic layer) can now be sourced from multiple databases, overcoming a major obstacle of previous versions.
2. Universe can now access MOLAP (cubes from Microsoft Analysis Services, Essbase, Mondrian, etc.) data sources directly via MDX without having to “flatten them out” first. In prior versions, Universe could only access SQL sources.
3. There’s now a more common look and feel to individual BI products, including Crystal, WebI, Explorer, and Analysis (former BEx). This is another step in the right direction to unify SAP BI products, but it’s still not a complete solution. It will be a while before all SAP BI products are fully and seamlessly integrated, as well as other BI tools/platforms that grew more organically.
4. All SAP BI tools, including Xcelsius (Dashboards in 4.0), that did not have access to BO Universe now do.
5. There’s now a tighter integration with BW via direct exposure of BW metadata (BEx queries and InfoProviders) to all BO tools.
6. Improved BI/BW performance. This is the one I can’t validate until I talk with some customers. But SAP claims that, starting with 4.0, BW will have a unique set of proprietary SAP APIs that are 4+ times faster than APIs that are available to the other BI tools. I am assuming that what this means is that from now on, BW access by BusinessObjects will be faster than by any other BI tool.
7. Last but not least, 4.0 is the first version highly optimized for the HANA in-memory appliance. Previous versions and other BI tools will also work with HANA; that should not be the primary factor in your decision whether to upgrade to 4.0 or not, but it’s indeed another variable in the mix. What does “optimized” mean in this case? Remember, all of your BI applications (with the exception of in-memory specific BI apps) were written and optimized for accessing disk-based RDBMSes. Chunks of code that were written specifically for that purpose can now be removed, and that code can be optimized for direct memory data access. That’s indeed what SAP claims they did in version 4.0.

To be continued