The technical challenges in an SAP BusinessObjects project have been a chief concern for SAP BW customers. In fact, technical challenges – such as the complexity and multiplicity of connectivity options and subsequent scalability and performance concerns — outrank budget, skills and understanding of the tool set as the primary challenge in such projects, according to a comprehensive insiderResearch report, “The SAP BI Roadmap: Perceptions, challenges, and opportunities for SAP customers.”

But in SAP BusinessObjects 4.0, the next-generation BI platform SAP’s been crafting for three years and will release this week, BW customers should see significant improvements in ease of integration, scalability and performance.

SAP's BusinessObjects 4.0 platform promises easier integration of the SAP BusinessObjects tools for BW customers.

“When SAP used to say, ‘We have the best integration to SAP,’ my opinion was: No you don’t. You have what everyone else has,” said Cindi Howson, founder of the BIScorecard. “Now, they can correctly claim that.”

One big reason why is something called BICS. SAP took out the “real power” of the BEx tools – the interfaced drivers that can go against direct BW queries – and carved out BICS – Business Intelligence Consumer Services. This layer will allow easier connections to SAP’s front-end BI tools, such as SAP Crystal Reports, Xcelsius (now SAP Dashboards) and Web Intelligence, that replace the BEx front-end tools such as Report Designer.  BEx Web Application Designer (WAD) is still in 4.0. However, there is a enhanced subsitute planned for the 4.1 release, under the project name Analysis Studio.

To wit: SAP promises jaw-dropping runtime query-performance improvements of up to 300 percent.

“This is an area we have focused ourselves to make sure we have the most seamless way that customers can take their existing investment in BW and expose it as BI content that sits above the BW data warehouse,” said George Mathew, SAP’s VP & GM of business intelligence and in-memory analytics. “It’s very elegant and straightforward.”

BICS calls the same, well-performing ABAP functions used natively in BEx and BEx web queries, said Justin Burmeister, a long-time SAP Basis administrator. As of SAP BusinessObjects release 3.0 and BW / NetWeaver 7.0, technical integration was accomplished largely using the MDX interface in BW.  Open MDX multidimensional OLAP queries go through a series of flattening activities to accommodate BW’s relational data model.

“This can result in some significant performance and scalability problems in both BW (ABAP CPU time & Expensive SQL/DB Time) and BusinessObjects (CPU time & memory), exacerbated by BusinessObjects’ 32-bit architecture and its accompanying memory limitations,” he said via email.

In turn, Burmeister is encouraged that BusinessObjects 4.0 is now 64-bit—a significant improvement, since it allows for addressing large memory space. SAP BusinessObjects 3.x versions crash all the time when flattening MDX result sets, he said.

“I’m not sure it’s necessarily getting simpler. If anything it may be more complicated in the near-term – particularly for customers who have invested in cobbling together a workable BOBJ 3.x-BW 7.x infrastructure,” he said via an e-mail response. “But I do think it is getting a lot better, and the end-user experience will be much improved as these tools continue to evolve.” 

There are also other SAP-related integrations in SAP BusinessObjects 4.0 of note – including Solution Manager, Identity Manager, and SAP Change and Transport.

Said SAP’s David Weisbeck: “It’s heavily integrated into the larger SAP technologies.”

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4 Comments for SAP BusinessObjects, BW Integration to Get Easier in BI 4.0

Courtney Bjorlin

Thank you to Ingo Hilgefort and Tammy Powlas for correcting a point in here.

In BI 4.0, Web Application Designer (WAD) is still the tool for building and planning applications. In BI 4.1, it will be replaced by a tool under the project name ‘Analysis Studio.’ This is “the next analysis generation tool – a design environment – like the Web Application Designer – an instrument for IT to build planning and analytical apps – will deliver dedicated apps using the same runtime. Analysis for OLAP will be part of the Analysis Studio offering,” Powlas wrote in her blog.

For comprehensive technical roadmap information, I’d recommend a visit Tammy’s blog at http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/23362.

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Jay Riddle

Justin Burmeister hit the nail on the head at the end of this article:

“I’m not sure it’s necessarily getting simpler. If anything it may be more complicated in the near-term – particularly for customers who have invested in cobbling together a workable BOBJ 3.x-BW 7.x infrastructure,”…

As a consultant with an SAP Partner actively assisting customers involved in the BI 4.0 ramp-up, the complexities I’ve experienced haven’t occurred while helping SAP customers deploy the BI 4.0 platform for the first time. Instead, the intricacies have been with managing the varying expectations of SAP NetWeaver BW customers already leveraging the SAP BusinessObjects XI 3.1 tools, whom are also interested in finding the quickest and most painless route to adopting the latest in proprietary connectivity.

This is especially true of those customers who have already invested heavily in building a framework of design methodologies and best practices for developing Web Intelligence reports\OLAP Universes on top of BEx Queries. For the customers who worked around the current constraints associated with the OLAP Data Access (ODA) layer through a more uncomfortable process of trial and error; the business case for adopting BICS and the tools that leverage the new OLAP enhancements doesn’t get much easier within the context of tackling brand new BI development.

What’s “more complicated”, as put by Burmeister, are the challenges that lay ahead for those already deeply invested in delivering BI content (eg. Web Intelligence documents) developed using the current OLAP BAPI connector. While even more complexity awaits customers who choose to align early with a migration roadmap filled with bridges yet to be crossed, and even some that have yet to be built.

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Courtney Bjorlin

Hi Jay, Yes, Justin really knows his stuff. Thank you for taking the time to elaborate on the point – great detail here. Sounds like this is going to continue to be a big challenge for the many customers who didn’t, or probably more acuurately couldn’t, ‘wait’ for 4.0.

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Mark Prosser

What is of great frustration to those of us who have many years of experience working with BusinessObjects over a SQL Server or Oracle (or indeed other RDBS) schema and now reporting over BW-sourced data is the lack of support for relative dates. BusinessObjects addressed a weakpoint in their offering a few years ago and overhauled their scheduling tool. As such, reports can now easily be scheduled to run every minute/hour/day/Monday/month and so on with no intervention from the IT/BI team. They can simply arrive in a customer’s inbox or shared area and will show data relative to the time period they are covering.

Great, BW can do that. But not easily. Within, say, a SQL Server environment, the universe designer will create relative dates based on manipulations of the getdate() database function that returns the current date (and time). Based on this, I would only need to create one data provider to build a report that showed sales figures for yesterday, this week, this month and this year, coupled with corresponding figures for this week last year, this month last year and YTD for last year. My understanding is that for something scheduled requiring no intervention sourced from SAP BW I would need multiple queries and as such multiple universes.

Have we been misled by our BW person or is that genuinely the situation?

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