Comments for My life as a BI consultant http://rbranger.wordpress.com The blog of Raphael Branger Tue, 14 May 2013 04:14:46 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ Comment on A ray of hope for frustrated BOBJ folks by rbranger http://rbranger.wordpress.com/2012/08/10/a-ray-of-hope-for-frustrated-bobj-folks/#comment-551 Tue, 14 May 2013 04:14:46 +0000 http://rbranger.wordpress.com/?p=86#comment-551 Hi Dave

Thank you for commenting. I agree with you that SAP wasted a lot of the value they bought with the original BusinessObjects company. But again, I see a “ray of hope” looking at SAP Visual Intelligence or now (renamed, guess what…) called SAP Lumira. Here SAP manages to act very agile and customer focussed. Nothing about a “slow, bureaucratic approach”. I don’t want to defend SAP’s weaknesses as a large, not very agile company. Nevertheless also want to give them a chance to improve. And obviously there are product groups within SAP which are really capable of this.

Folks, by the way if you are Europe / EMEA based have a look at the upcoming BOAK event series during September 17 – 20 in Zurich / Switzerland: SAP Lumira Product Managers Mani Srini and Saurabh Abhyankar will teach you during a one day workshop with the topic “Bring your own data”. Don’t miss this opportunity to get in touch with the people making even an SAP an innovative company…

See http://www.boak.ch for general information about BOAK2013
See http://www.it-logix.ch?id=159&L=1&vortrag_id=102 for dedicated info about the SAP Lumira Workshop with Mani & Co.

Best regards
Raphael

]]> Comment on A ray of hope for frustrated BOBJ folks by policywank http://rbranger.wordpress.com/2012/08/10/a-ray-of-hope-for-frustrated-bobj-folks/#comment-549 Mon, 13 May 2013 21:37:59 +0000 http://rbranger.wordpress.com/?p=86#comment-549 If SAP were capable of real BI innovation, they wouldn’t have had to buy BOBJ in the first place. They laid off and/or drove away soooooooooo many former BOBJ employees in 2009 and 2010 that they really no longer have the core of what made BOBJ an innovative company. SAP’s slow, bureaucratic approach that dictates the way things “should be” may be fine for a massive, established company that can often dictate to its customers, but it absolutely drives away the kind of people who want to create the cool new stuff and not be told how to do it. So many of the old BOBJ people that I worked with are either doing BI for former customers or they work for BI start ups. A lot of the old BOBJ people that still work for SAP work on other SAP tools now.

]]> Comment on BO 4.0 FP3: get eFashion and other MS Access datasources working by rbranger http://rbranger.wordpress.com/2012/05/04/bo-4-0-fp3-get-efashion-and-other-ms-access-datasources-working/#comment-513 Thu, 09 May 2013 14:36:31 +0000 http://rbranger.wordpress.com/?p=58#comment-513 Thanks Dallas for referencing!

]]> Comment on BO 4.0 FP3: get eFashion and other MS Access datasources working by Converting eFashion from UNV to UNX http://rbranger.wordpress.com/2012/05/04/bo-4-0-fp3-get-efashion-and-other-ms-access-datasources-working/#comment-512 Thu, 09 May 2013 14:19:23 +0000 http://rbranger.wordpress.com/?p=58#comment-512 […] UPDATE: This article was written with SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.0 SP2, the General Availability (GA) release. Raphael Branger reports that SAP BusinessObjects Feature Pack 3 includes fixes to help migrate Microsoft Access universes like eFashion to the new UNX format (see related article, BO 4.0 FP3: get eFashion and other MS Access datasources working). […]

]]> Comment on The Rule of Thumb for BOBJ Tool Selection by Anil http://rbranger.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/the-rule-of-thumb-for-bobj-tool-selection/#comment-459 Mon, 29 Apr 2013 16:40:13 +0000 http://rbranger.wordpress.com/?p=206#comment-459 Thanks for the artical. As described thumb rule is for current customer usage, but to attain more results or BI requirments the new tools acepability should be worked on.

]]> Comment on The Rule of Thumb for BOBJ Tool Selection by Aravind http://rbranger.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/the-rule-of-thumb-for-bobj-tool-selection/#comment-435 Sat, 27 Apr 2013 08:48:21 +0000 http://rbranger.wordpress.com/?p=206#comment-435 Hi Rapheal,
Thanks for a well-articulated blog. Personally when I interacted with customers many a times i found lots of difficulties in making them understand which is the Right Tool to use. They themselves are confused with lots of tools from SAP. Look like SAP is busy coming up with new Tools for reporting, Discovery and Analysis, Dashboarding etc. Question arises, why can’t we analyze the data using Webi and OLAP Edition. Why cant we use Webi to do Data Discovery?. Personally I also gets confused at times and ask the same question myself. In that perspective, your blog makes lots of sense.

Just a thought from my side, rather than deciding on which tool to use, why can’t SAP or another vendor design a BI Tool, which takes user’s input and the tool gets customized by itself and show required connectivity and features. A customizable BI tool based on the user’s need. Rather than different tools based on functionality and features, a BI Tool that get customized according to User’s need based on functionality and features what user want….

Aravind

]]> Comment on The Rule of Thumb for BOBJ Tool Selection by Corey Adams http://rbranger.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/the-rule-of-thumb-for-bobj-tool-selection/#comment-409 Wed, 24 Apr 2013 22:36:43 +0000 http://rbranger.wordpress.com/?p=206#comment-409 Hi Don,

I get your meaning and agree to a certain extent, however do not think Dashboards will replace reporting. It is a smarter alternative for some (not all) use cases, allowing fast, easily identifiable and actionable insight. But, there will always be a need for reports and interactive analysis at some level in an organization, hence why dashboards, advanced analytics, reports, ad hoc / interactive analysis are all part of the wider BI or Analytics Stack.

Raphael has it pegged in the sense that Webi, although not an expert tool for each of these functions, can and does meet a wider range of needs than most of the other “purpose” built tools. Therefore, is an excellent place to start.

Corey

]]> Comment on The Rule of Thumb for BOBJ Tool Selection by Corey Adams http://rbranger.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/the-rule-of-thumb-for-bobj-tool-selection/#comment-408 Wed, 24 Apr 2013 22:27:23 +0000 http://rbranger.wordpress.com/?p=206#comment-408 Hey Jamie,

“Best practice” aside and speaking totally from a useabilty perspective, Webi on Bex is a nice experience. There are limitations, both from your Webi expectations and Bex expectations, and as much as I’m not a fan of “yet another semantic layer” (off topic), the output is very nice, much better than vlookups and the like, and performs well, better on Hana of course (off topic again).

Corey

]]> Comment on The Rule of Thumb for BOBJ Tool Selection by Jamie Oswald (@oswaldxxl) http://rbranger.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/the-rule-of-thumb-for-bobj-tool-selection/#comment-406 Wed, 24 Apr 2013 19:35:58 +0000 http://rbranger.wordpress.com/?p=206#comment-406 Regarding Web Intelligence on BW, is it not good (see other comments)? Or is it good (see http://blogs.sap.com/analytics/2013/04/24/interactive-ad-hoc-reporting-just-got-easier/)?

]]> Comment on The Rule of Thumb for BOBJ Tool Selection by rbranger http://rbranger.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/the-rule-of-thumb-for-bobj-tool-selection/#comment-395 Wed, 24 Apr 2013 07:55:25 +0000 http://rbranger.wordpress.com/?p=206#comment-395 Besides the fantastic option with XWIS, I hope SAP Product Management is reading our conversation. I still have some hope as SAP is famous for constantly changing its product roadmap (in addition to product names) ;-)

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