OnDemand blog has moved

The new location for the SAP BusinessObjects OnDemand blog is:
https://weblogs.sdn.sap.com/weblogs/topic/122

SaaS BI: Part of a hybrid approach?

In a video posted by InformationWeek last week, Bill McDermott, president of Global Field Operations at SAP, comments on SAP's approach to software as a service. From Alexander Wolfe's notes on the interview:

Moving forward [McDermott] sees the two approaches [self-hosted software and software as a service] coexisting in a way that's not necessarily in conflict. "I think both models are viable" McDermott says. "There are mission-critical, end-to-end business processes that large companies run to keep their company going. They have large transaction rates and they require visibility on an end-to-end basis and very tight integration. Those processes will continue to be run on-premise. There will also be loosely coupled applications that don't need to be tightly coupled to the core process in the enterprise. Those will be easily provisioned in an on-demand model."

He continues: "Ultimately, the best of both worlds is to have full integration in the enterprise where you have to have it for risk management, compliance, and execution, and still be able to integrate the on-demand model into the enterprise. That's the hybrid model that SAP sees. That's the model we think gives the customer the most value."

With regard to business intelligence in particular, it's already commonplace for companies to rely on both internal data sources (e.g. SAP, Oracle) and external data sources (e.g. Salesforce.com, NetSuite). Business Intelligence OnDemand is designed to capitalize on that heterogeneity - by using a data integration hub to process incoming data from both on-premise and off-premise sources - giving organizations a unified view of information that's critical to see together, even if it comes from multiple sources.

Webcast on BI in Custom Cloud Applications

Next week, Dominic Mantua & Rob Rohloff will be presenting SMART APPLICATION COMPANIES SELL MORE, ADDING VALUE WITH ADVANCED REPORTING & BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE on Wednesday, April 29th at 10:00 am PDT (1:00 pm EDT)

If you're interested in attending, you can register at: http://tinyurl.com/dx2ocw

If you've built an online application, you have enabled your customers to be more nimble and responsive through your on-demand software solutions. But are your customers getting all of the insight they need from the data inside your applications? Information is critical to success in the rapidly moving and occasionally fickle on-demand world. Now with the move of business intelligence (BI) to an on-demand model, BI applications have gotten easier to integrate in to your applications and more cost effective to deploy, allowing you to share more valuable insight. Join SAP Business Objects, the leader in business intelligence, for a discussion of on-demand business intelligence solutions customized for your SaaS / OnDemand applications, their impact and why you can't afford not to employ them.

Specific topics will include:
· Aligning strategy with performance
· Developing new products and services your customers want and need
· Insuring your applications are ready to handle growth
· Reducing costs in the supply chain and operations
· Providing transparency for compliance
· crystalreports.com as a BI solution

Hope to see you online!

How much risk is there in your supply chain?

If you're a manufacturer, how do you assess the risk of key suppliers failing? This Financial Times article from November 2008 tells how a British defense group met with its top 100 suppliers and asked them, point blank, to notify it about any potential financial difficulties – and how a French aerospace and defense company created a "crisis cell" team to monitor its 4,000 suppliers.

A disruption to your supply chain – leading to delayed delivery, reduced product quality, or in a worst case, the entire disruption of sales – could reduce your incoming revenue as much as slowing demand would.

Given the severity of the potential impact of a failed supplier, do you have the right tools at your disposal to help assess risk? If you're a member of a dedicated supply chain analysis team at a larger organization – or a procurement analyst at a smaller organization who's been asked to assess risk – the following reports, available in the Information OnDemand store, might be appropriate for your toolbox.

• Media Sentiment Comparison
  Look for early signs of trouble at suppliers by gauging the sentiment expressed in news stories about them. With this report, you can measure the volume of media coverage and its tone – positive, negative, or neutral – about a company and a broader, related industry. News feeds are supplied by Newstin, a source that covers 150,000 news outlets in 20 languages, and allows you navigate back to the original content.
• Credit Score Highlights
  Keep tabs on which suppliers might be at risk of bankruptcy with this report, which uses up-to-date data from D&B. It shows credit score highlights for up to five companies and allows you to compare overall credit scores, which represent the ability for companies to pay their debt within the next 90 days.
• Company Lead Generator
  Identify alternative suppliers using this model, also based on D&B data – to proactively reduce risk, or to replace a supplier that already shows signs of disruption. Use zip codes and four-digit SIC industry codes to create a list of potential suppliers. Combine it with the report above to ensure that potential suppliers have healthy credit scores.
• Competitive Model
  Use this dashboard to compare the health of two suppliers you may be deciding between – by looking at growth rate, profitability, asset utilization, and liquidity. You can drill into any of these four dimensions and track up to 20 subcategories. The continuously updated data comes from Thomson Reuters and shows the trend for the last 16 quarters.

Because all of these reports are prebuilt, you save the time and hassle of having to collect and update data on a regular basis. If you choose to subscribe to the Information OnDemand service, you can also pay a flat per-user fee, which means that you're protected against increased costs if the amount of research you need to do increases dramatically.