Business Objects - SAP integration...

[Asim_Munshi]

SAP To Acquire Business Objects In $6.8-Billion Friendly Takeover ...old 2007 news. The integration process is well into its final phases. How has the integration impacted you?

One of the things SAP does not do is to keep duplicate competing products. An initial product roadmap has been announced for the Business Objects and SAP product lines. The immediate impact is on the front end tools targeting the business user community

BEx bye bye!

The plan is to

• Replace BEx Report Designer with Crystal Reports and Crystal Reports Light
• Replace BEx Excel Analyzer and BEx Web Analyzer with Voyager. Voyager will be renamed to Pioneer. A stripped down flavor called Pioneer Light will be available. This is an Olap analysis tool which can connect directly to cubes and BEx Queries.
• In the Area of Dashboarding -- Web Application designer will be replaced by Xcelsius, called Xclesius+ in late 2009 and beyond
• Business Objects Polestar is an innovative search engine facilitating intuitive analysis.
• Business Objects Web Intelligence will continue on its current path and serve the adhoc business user community. Web Intelligence requires a proprietary 'universe' or semantic layer for it to be able to create reports.

The latest Business Objects Enterprise release available is XIR3.1. An SAP Integration kit is available as a separate package which enables SAP and Business Objects Systems to communicate. 

There were quite a few questions in Infodays. I was intrigued by two in particular

• 1. What will happen to the BusinessObjects Enterprise platform? Will we have a BusinessObjects powered by Netweaver in the future? The challenge here is that BusinessObjects Enterprise supports a wider variety of third party products making it harder to replace..
• 2. What is the future of the BusinessObjects front ends - Infoview and CMC.

The field eagerly awaits details. The current BEx tools are tightly coupled with SAP. Crystal provides the widest range of options for connecting to SAP presently.  It can connect to Tables Clusters and Functions via the OpenSQL driver, talk to Infosets, Queries, cubes and the ODS and seems to be front runner. The OLAP/BAPI driver is used by Webi and Voyager and does not require the transports. Web Intelligence and Voyager  is much easier to use than Crystal and puts the power of adhoc analysis in the hands of the Business User.

SAP product set is considered strong when it comes to heirarchies, ragged - unbalanced and the kind while this has been a traditional weakness on the Business Objects front end...expect more synergies here.

( I plan to post my journey on working with the Integration kit, complete with links so that it can be retravelled, progressing to the specific toolsets of Voyager, Web Intelligence, Xcelsius in  the near term...so keep checking. comments welcome).