SAP is the market leader in Analytic Applications!

It is with great delight that I announce what we have known for quite some time internally: SAP is the market leader in Analytic Applications according to IDC. To further extend our leadership, we also announced the GA of our xApp Analytic composites, which allow customers for the first time to realize the promise of combining transactional and analytical information in the context of a business process to facilitate decision-making.

In parallel with this announcement, we also had two announcements on the infrastructure side: on the BI platform side, entitled SAP Reports Significant Market Share Gain in Business Intelligence, which details the great improvements we’ve made on the infrastructure side and our customers’ successes with NetWeaver BI 2004s and NetWeaver Business Intelligence Accelerator, and on the MDM side, entitled SAP Leads Product Information Management Market Worldwide, that articulates SAP’s leadership in the Product Information Management market. From the combination of these announcements, it should be clear that SAP is clearly serious about the Business Intelligence and Performance Management market and have numerous customer successes to prove it.

Existing Oracle Customers Get More Confused: When should they use Sunopsis, Oracle Warehouse Builder, Informatica, or Ascential?

Oracle announced that it would be acquiring Sunopsis, a data integration vendor with solid products. Well, you can't fault Oracle for giving their customers choices! Existing Oracle customers already had THREE SEPARATE ETL tools that they had to use with Oracle products even BEFORE this acquisition:

• existing ETL technologies of Oracle Warehouse Builder which they just made a big deal about how they had enhanced significantly in their latest release. Guess it couldn't have been THAT good.
• existing OEM relationship they have with Informatica that they inherited from Siebel Analytics.
• existing OEM relationship they have with Ascential that they inherited from PeopleSoft.

And now, Sunopsis. So for Oracle customers who owned PeopleSoft HCM, and Siebel CRM, and Oracle ERP, what should they use for their data integration needs? Contrast this with SAP, who has pursued an organic growth strategy and has one set of data integration tools for our applications across the entire enterprise. NetWeaver Business Intelligence includes sophisticated ETL capabilities that support analytic applications in every major horizontal: CRM, HCM, FIN, SCM, SRM, and PLM. With over 12,000 installations, and referenceable customers in every vertical we must be doing something right.

So, thank you, Oracle for continuing to give customers a reason to take the Safe Passage to SAP. We look forward to you acquiring even more companies that overlap directly with your existing assets and continue to confuse your installed base.

Does SAP really provide a Data Warehouse that requires no tuning or aggregates?

Mark Rittman, one of the sharpest minds in the Analytics and Business Intelligence space, had this to say about my previous post on SAP's Business Intelligence Accelerator: "Neshan Bardolliwalla (sic) talks about SAP's new in-memory BI accelerator that requires no tuning or need to build aggregates (as my son says, "yeah...right.")" It is hard to believe for those of us who have been in this industry for a while, but it is absolutely true. Here is an excerpt from my response to Mark which I posted as a comment on his website.

While I am not at liberty to disclose the detailed internals of the product, consider that a 64-bit computer can address 16 exibytes of memory. So, if you were take your ENTIRE data warehouse at its MOST granular level, without ANY aggregates whatsoever, put it in main memory, index that data, and then use clever on-the-fly search techniques to locate that data, you could most certainly eliminate the need for aggregates or any tuning whatsoever. I’ve seen it with my own eyes, and yes, I didn’t believe it when I heard it either.

With today’s technology and Moore’s law continuing to operate, the need for disk-based database systems will continue to become less relevant as memory-based systems become cheaper to exploit and algorithms continue to be developed that allow one to search the addressable space of memory that a 64 bit processor is capable of addressing.

To put this into perspective, to get the same performance that BIA provides from an RDBMS vendor would cost about TEN TIMES as much.

SAP's BI Accelerator - The future is in memory-based data warehouses

Well, the cat is finally out of the bag. Renee Boucher Ferguson, an excellent reporter at eWeek, broke the story last month about how SAP was moving to use in-memory technology in our BI Accelerator product. In an article in yesterday's edition of eWeek, she interviews Shai Agassi about the implications of this technology for data warehouses and even systems that need transactional storage.

The BI Accelerator is an amazing piece of technology that has become very popular very quickly among SAP's NetWeaver BI customers. Imagine a scenario where there is no query tuning or aggregate building in your data warehouse. Ever. The entire data warehouse at the most granular level is stored in addressable memory and indexed in such a way that performance is blindingly fast. We have seen unbelievable performance gains using this technology, and I'm excited by the possibilities of where we at SAP will continue to push the boundaries of what can be done with it.

Oracle's inability to focus and execute in BI

Dan Everett is a sharp guy who I had the privilege of working with when I was at Hyperion Solutions. I was pleased to hear that he recently jointed Ventana Research. In his analysis of Oracle's recent BI announcement, he makes the following comment:

Oracle's BI focus has been inconsistent in the past - making major announcements
and looking to generate revenue from BI one year, but in the next, making no
announcements and offering BI as a loss leader to generate database revenue.

I couldn't have said it better myself. Oracle has been dabbling in BI for more than a decade, but aside from their excellent database, has never executed in this space in any other part of the BI stack. History has shown over and over again that no matter how good their acquired products may be, if the champions of those products are not the ones with the political influence to ensure their viability, then Oracle will squash them for the products that were developed in house.