MANILA, PHILIPPINES, 25 FEBRUARY 2010 – SAP is making its business intelligence (BI) solutions more accessible to more users as it introduced a package of solutions intended for “casual users”.
The software applications company said its Business Objects OnDemand solution will be available to the “underserved” market as an independent analysis shows that the market for this type of solutions is healthy.
BusinessObjects OnDemand is SAP’s BI solution offered through software-as-a-service (SaaS) business model. SAP said its offering is complete with integrated BI toolset and organisations need not search for other vendors for their on-demand BI needs.
IDC said the SaaS BI market is expected to grow three times faster than the overall BI and analytics market over the next five years.
“As organisations look for intuitive, cloud-based solutions that can empower their end-users, applications that supplement traditional BI functionality of query, reporting and analysis with support for workflow, search and collaboration will become increasingly attractive to them – especially applications that offer rapid, alternative deployment options,” said Dan Vesset, program vice president, business analytics, IDC.
No training needed
SAP’s SaaS BI offering requires no prior training for users, the company claimed, and is more flexible to implement. “Even casual users can then combine that data in just a few clicks, and follow a guided path that walks them through reporting and analysis,” SAP said.
It is also made more accessible with flexible pricing based on the company’s needs.
“Customers want to work with their data their way – whether it’s behind a firewall, on the Web, or on their local computer in spreadsheets,” said Simon Dale, senior vice president and head, business user and platform organisation, SAP Asia Pacific and Japan.
“With access to data at their fingertips, customers can make more confident decisions, share their insights with others and react quickly to any changes in their business. SAP makes BI more pervasive by giving under-served casual users an affordable, easy-to-use on-demand BI solution. This is an important milestone in SAP’s on-demand vision, and further proof that we continue to innovate in the cloud.”
Users can also easily generate reports for sharing with colleagues inside and outside the firewall.
SAP has also forged a tie-up with Salesforce.com so that data from a Salesforce application can be accessed using BusinessObjects BI OnDemand.
