CenterChannel.Org

Virtual Business Vehicles - What we could do then, what we can do now,...what we can do tomorrow

1. What we could do then:

http://www.geocities.com/wallstreet/7040

2. What we can do now:

http://TurningPoint-Solutions.com

3. What we can do tomorrow?

http://CenterChannel.typepad.com

Q: What are things you can do today because of technology that you couldn't do five years ago?
Presented by Intel, Sponsors of Tomorrow.

A: I can create mass market caliber broadcast vehicles that promote business and do it virtually and without waste and use these vehicles to promote and support my future endeavors.

Approaching Escape Velocity

Escape velocity is the speed where the kinetic energy of an object is equal to the magnitude of its gravitational potential energy.

The object in this case is me.  The gravitational potential energy is the career options at my current employer.

Yesterday June 2nd, marked my 13th Anniversary at SAP.  Some may say 13's an unlucky number, and so it may seem that way, since on my 1st day of my 14th year I was informed that my position had been eliminated.

In other words, my potential energy has been released and there is no more gravity to keep me orbiting the "Planet of E".

Potential energy which has been released is converted into Kinetic energy. Without any other constraints it proves to have its own trajectory and speed.

It is time to change direction.   It is time to harvest that potential energy.   It is time.  And time is money.

Turning Point is here.

SAP retires overlapping BI products

Received today

From: Kemal Aydin Date: May 2, 2008  Linked-In

To: Fermin Iduate

Hello,

I asked a question about SAP's acquisition of BOBJ couple months ago, and got very informative responses from the members and on the other boards I posted the same question.

I found out another article on InfoWorld:

SAP retires overlapping BI products
Analyst commends SAP for taking decisive actions, says more is likely to follow

http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/03/28/SAP-retires-overlapping-BI-products_1.html

What are your thoughts on this?

And, I also started a new LinkedIn group named "New SAP BI Landscape" to network with people who has experience in these BI solutions ( SAP, BOBJ, Outlooksoft etc ) which are under SAP umbrella now, if you want to become a member please visit this page:

http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/98330/2BCCEC6C8892

Thanks,
Kemal

You pick a very important and demanding question to answer...one that most would not dare to touch unless protected by disclaimer and non-disclosure...or....working with published roadmap documentation.

There have been a few commentaries within the last couple of weeks regarding the theme of your question...that of "retiring" certain products within either organization, which have led me likewise to ask internally the preciseness of these commentaries...given my involvement and understanding of the products from a functional perspective...and also having taken a look under the hood (so to say) under each megamachine from a "non-developer" technical perspective.

Its not a quick nor easy task to select the best of breed or "Golden Applications" out of either side. BO comes to the table from a mostly "Business User" or Departmental perspective with on average a larger # of deals at a lower deal price which is perfect for the ME and SMB markets. They lacked in Business Content and saw that SAP would complement them from a Best Practice and Bsn Content perspective. SAP comes to the table with the biggest most robust global platforms and platform control and developement. Although they have been very thorough in their design interpretation and most importantly EXECUTION of the best practises of the Data Warehousing industry and have employed the latest in technological tools and protocol...they have not received the acceptance of the Business User or Departmental community due to complexity of implementation and a UI which simply "doesn't ring the users bells".

Some of the positive commentary I've seen regarding this subject from both press and even some of your answers here applaud the fact that "Decisions are being made" and that Oracle should in fact take note as they could benefit from such determination and direction. I do take note that this opinion may be somewhat biased.

On one hand you have a slick front-end with what I've got to admit is a pretty sweet mSQL & Office > to Dashboarding mechanism. But I find that if you look into some of the implementation tasks and customization you may need to be a bit more SQL intensive. This is common with what are known as 2-Tier systems. Report/Query writers > Database

On the other hand, you have an immense infrastructure that runs on multiple databases, is fully up to par with all technical protocols and standards, runs off ABAP, .NET, or Java, is integrated with a role based portal, complete with taxonomy engines and fully compliant with all DW practices as well as datamining and information distribution with an Object based and role based authorization concept allowing for SSO capabilites as well. Oh yes...and more importantly this is a 3-tier system Report/Query Writers > Aggregated Models > Database

And the most important item to note is that one does not need to know SQL in order to generate the query.

I'd hate to see something with so much thought and investment that is understood by too little people with not a lot of insight .....simply looked over for just a few bells and wistles.

My personal belief is that they should "morph" the two worlds thereby "stiching" together robust platform with front-end beauty and flexibility.

The problem lies in that they service two worlds....the non-SAP world and the SAP world...and they want the same platform for both. That's going to be a difficult one to solve without quite a few players getting hurt along the way.

Hope this doesn't hurt anyone's feelings or action plans...I've tried to take my area of expertise as honestly, straightforwardly and competently as possible. Hopefully this takes the discussion into a larger context and puts it into the proper perspective.

I want to share my answer with my extended community....

What is Business Intelligence?

Okay....so its been a while since I've shared my thoughts with Cyberspace.   Who knows what nano particles vibrate in other universes as a result of this submission?

Speaking of universes.....I just returned from my rapid insertion training into the toolsets of Business Objects (an SAP Company) in Vancouver.

Despite weathering the  0°c (+/-2) temperatures for a week (quite an accomplishment for a long time Miamese), the city and surroundings are very nice, and I actually was able to reinitialize my parallel skiing capabilities.

So....getting round to the subject matter....during this training of approx. 30 solution engineers the BOBJ crew asked the Sappers the question..."What is Business Intelligence"?

A well polished answer eventually came from the crowd of very astute and proven SE's...something to the tune of "bringing the right information...to the right people....at the right time..." and also something like..."thereby making information...ACTIONABLE".

Bush must be speaking to our folks because I can't count the number of times I've heard him repeat Gen'l. BetrayUS...I mean "Petrayus'" words....."Actionable Intelligence".   Perhaps he really meant "re-actionable Intelligence".

After such a brandished and excellent corporate response I volunteered an alternative explanation with somewhat dissipated response....."The word Intelligence...according to Webster's meaning...is..the ability to learn or understand..or in other words "Reason"....and well the word "Business" is all about making money, or commercial trade.  In my opinion....too much emphasis is placed upon making people 'actionable' by delivering information to them via alerts....portals....emails...etc, rather than understanding the critical value adding processes involved in a particular business unit and understanding or "reasoning" what conditions and status of the process are... in order to automatically manage and optimize the process via intelligence and feedback as well as the cumulative knowledge of human experts having managed such processes and particular work steps by way of their management procedures and datasources.

In other words...why not make it less "Human Centric". 

This thought pattern is similar to how we currently manage to transport Millions of people daily around the world in commercial aircraft handling various phases of "The human Transport business".  The most critical business process after operations, maintenance, reservations & bookings, collections, flight services, ....and many others...is....."flying the plane safely from point A to B".

Although most passengers that travel now-a-days believe the pilot & co-pilot along with the flight engineers actually fly the planes....any seasoned traveller who's had a casual conversation with a pilot will tell you that for the most part....planes can take off and land as well as keep to the flight program in a very automated way.   Alerts for the most part...."are for and when operating outside of established parameters".

With so much emphasis being placed upon SOA "Service oriented Architecture, and SaaS  "Software as a Service"....or in other words "Plug & Pay" value adding business processes....wouldn't you think that a bit of "Business Intelligence" might be an additional "Value Add" that customers would be willing to pay for?  Specially if you're purchasing the cumulative "best practise" not of industries but of human beings?

Well...enough of a rant on the evils of the "Product Lifecycle philosophy" or the greedy milking by current day "robber-barons" of the unknowing masses of consumers with irrelevant but seemingly appealing technologies, only to upsell them so many weeks into the future with the new feature sets we failed to have available yet...