SAP gets busy with BI and Big Data

Over the last few weeks there have been a number of announcements coming out from SAP regarding Business Intelligence and Big Data. Here is a selection of the most noteworthy and a look at what they mean for users.

SAP has been on the acquisition trail yet again, with the announcement that it is planning to acquire predictive analytics firm KXEN. This is further evidence of the strides that SAP is making in the area of Big Data, with industry watchers seeing this acquisition as a way for SAP to increase the use of its own tools amongst ordinary businesses through adding more information.

In other Big Data news, SAP announced partnerships with Intel and Hortonworks, whereby the company will be reselling both companys respective Hadoop distributions. According to The Register, large SAP customers will now be able to have a combined vendor for their analytic and data platform products. Long-time SAP customers will now likely get the software wrapped into their on-going contracts.

From a product perspective, SAP announced the latest release of SAP BusinessObjects. Version 4.1 promises to provide a simplified user interface and improved mobile worker access. Further enhancements include greater user customisation, improved visualisation capabilities and greater support for Big Data sources.

We have streams at this years User Conference devoted to SAP BI 4.1, Data Visualisation & Reporting, HANA and Analytics. So please regularly check out our speakers section for on-going updates.