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.

Contrasting Oracle's BI "Strategy" with SAP's BI Strategy

I was very pleased to see some great coverage today on SAP's Analytics and BI Strategy in the following article by Stephen Swoyer in Enterprise Systems: SAP Speaks Softly, but Carries a BIg Stick.

"For example, last month Oracle announced its first-ever Oracle Business Intelligence Suite product, which incorporates analytics capabilities Oracle acquired from the former Siebel Systems Inc. In promoting its new business intelligence (BI) suite offering, Oracle took the fight right to the BI pure-plays, arguing—in effect—that its ERP, database, and applications experience functioned to give it an especial insight into BI. "

"SAP could credibly make the same claim—perhaps even more so than Oracle. But the German ERP giant’s strategy has instead been content to quietly flesh out its own Netweaver-based BI stack, even as it downplays its own ambitions in the broader business intelligence marketplace."

I think Stephen was being very polite. Oracle's BI "strategy" is to make a big public proclamation to disguise the fact that they are throwing a huge bunch of products with disparate architectures, development teams, roadmaps, etc. into one big frying pan and hoping that their customers will get an Analytics omelette, when they are more likely to get salmonella.

How exactly does one "Fuse" the following products for each of the applications stacks that Oracle now possesses?

If you own Oracle applications, your BI and Analytics stack might include:

• Front-End: Oracle Daily Business Intelligence and Oracle Discoverer
• ETL: Oracle Warehouse Builder
• Data Warehouse: Oracle 10g

If you were a PeopleSoft customer, your BI and Analytics stack might include:

• Front-End: Crystal and/or SQR for Formatted Reporting
• ETL: First Informatica PowerMart, then Ascential DataStage
• Data Warehouse: PeopleSoft EPM

If you were a Siebel Business Analytics customer, your BI and Analytics stack might include:

• Front-End: Siebel Business Analytics for OLAP and Actuate for Formatted Reporting
• ETL: Informatica PowerCenter
• Data Warehouse: Siebel Relationship Management Warehouse

What a mess! I don't even know what the J.D. Edwards folks had, but it probably was different from the other three. So is Oracle going to consolidate all of these and somehow derive value for their customers in the process? And they are offering lifetime support for all of the existing products? It seems more likely that Oracle is going to do what Oracle has always done best historically, which is to extract value from its customers at their expense. Do you think Siebel Business Analytics customers are going to continue using Informatica for the long haul? Do you think PeopleSoft customers will continue to use Ascential for the long haul? Do you think Actuate figures into Oracle's long term plans? It took Oracle all of a few weeks to rip out IBM's hosting of Siebel's OnDemand offering and replace it with their own, so I'm sure they'll be happy to concede revenues for their slow growth database business to their acquired companies' erstwhile partners.

Let's contrast this with SAP's NetWeaver BI stack and SAP Analytics. If you are an SAP customer, here is what you get with SAP NetWeaver BI (and we don't charge you extra for it either):

• Front-End: BEx Suite - Integrated front-end tools for both Excel and web-based business intelligence. SAP Analytics - highly useable and flexible Analytical Applications targeted to specific roles in specific business processes.
• ETL: SAP NetWeaver BI provides a highly functional ETL stack, with change data capture, trickle-feed capabilities, and advanced data lineage capabilities. Think it's only for SAP data sources? We have reference customers who use it strictly for non-SAP data.
• Data Warehouse: SAP NetWeaver BI includes a full-featured ROLAP engine and a plethora of preconfigured relational cubes that customers can leverage out of the box to speed up deployment.

We at SAP like to do right by our customers and use this as our means of acquiring more of them. If you look under the covers, you will find us to offer a complete BI and Analytics stack capable of competing with anyone in the market. And it was built in house. And it runs on one stack, NetWeaver. Just don't expect us to host a four hour webcast to prove it. You can just ask the customers who chose us as their trusted partner, not whom we bought from someone else.

SAP Business Community for SAP xApp Analytics

Thanks to all of you who have written so enthusiastically and asked for further information about SAP xApp Analytics. SAP Business Community is offering a dedicated area specifically for SAP Analytics. You'll benefit from the following:

Webcasts & Online Demos
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Discussion Forum
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Blogs
Hear from SAP Executive Board members, who offer insight into why analytics are crucial to addressing today's challenges and to capitalizing on tomorrow's opportunities.

Brochures & White Papers
Read brochures and white papers that offer more detail about SAP Analytics, including an IDC white paper "Making Business Processes Dynamic by Embedding Intelligence".

News & Articles
This section features the most recent SAP press releases and news stories that provide meaningful information on SAP Analytics.

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