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SAP Chief Executive Leo Apotheker issued a call for increased transparency and clarity in business in his keynote address to company's annual Sapphire gathering in Orlando Tuesday. And he did so by announcing a new business intelligence offering that is so simple, even a CEO could use it.

The tongue-in-cheek remark was based on the fact that the new offering, SAP Business Objects Explorer, is a business intelligence tool that allows users to search through extensive data warehouses with little knowledge of databases or BI tools. The tool allows users to conduct queries using Google-like simple language searches.

An insurance company employee might, for example, ask a question such as "How many people died of head-related  injuries in motor vehicle crashes?" and the software would reach out into the company's various databases and retrieve the information.

From there the user could drill down further, separating the answers by age, sex, location or any number of variables, through a point and click GUI interface.

"Imagine a world where a business executive could test their hunches with just a few clicks," Apotheker told the gathering. "That's what we're talking about - delivering insight at the speed of thought."

The SAP BusinessObjects Explorer marks a significant milestone in the company's acquisition of BusinessObjects more than a year ago. The software has been used in beta tests at several corporations, but Sapphire marked its formal coming out party.

Katrina Coyle, global information manager for brewing giant Molson Coors, one of the first beta testers, says the software has made an immediate impact in operations. "Employees have already learned things about their data and our business that they didn't know previously," she said. "One of our business users was able to identify a brand not sold in other regions with only one click - which is a blink of an eye compared to the former lengthy process."

General availability of SAP BusinessObjects Explorer is planned for the summer of 2009. SAP is working with a variety of partners, including IBM, HP, Dell, and Fujitsu, to offer companies ready-to-run installations.

Comments (2)

	1. 05-14-2009 15:51
	This is the type of scenario companies and BI vendors have been talking about moving towards for some time - simple language queries. The key thing to note here though, is that this doesn't work unless the company has implemented an enterprise data warehouse strategy.  If you're only getting part of the picture, you're only getting part of the answer. Registered

Mike Valley

	2. 05-15-2009 15:42
	The other factor is the quality of the data. And, in fact, that was a major part of the message brought forward by technology executives at such companies as Molson Coors and Sara Lee. They were saying that its one thing to hand business users - or CEOs - tools to start doing their own analysis, but if the results are based on faulty underlying data, wrong conclusions will be drawn. Registered

Mel Duvall

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