Jon Reed: Welcome to out latest podcast on SAP skills trends. I'm your host, Jon Reed of JonERP.com, and joining me today is Franz Aman, who is the Vice President of Intelligence Platform Product Marketing for SAP Business Objects. Today, we're going to talk with Franz about the SAP Business Objects product roadmap, the skills needed for success with Business Objects, and how Business Objects can be relevant to SAP projects even in a downturn economy.

Franz Aman: I'm very happy to talk to you again. For those of you who detect a slight German accent, don't get confused: SAP is the very first German company I have ever worked for, and that happened through the Business Objects acquisition. I am actually a long-term Business Objects employee but really happy to be on board with SAP, and I'm having a blast here.

Reed: Tell us a little bit about your current role at SAP Business Objects.

Reed: I think what's interesting about the combined product line in your area is how complimentary some of these products are. For some folks who may not have a feel for that, maybe you can comment briefly on how, for example, the Business Intelligence Accelerator dovetails well with some of the capabilities that you've been trying to roll out on the Business Objects side.

Aman: Many of you out there have probably seen our roadmap. I want to emphasize that there's nothing inherently needed from a roadmap perspective to make the Business Objects tools and products work with the SAP tools and products. Fundamentally, everything is working together and has been working together for some time - that goes back to even the early days when SAP OEM'd some of the Business Objects technology like Crystal Reports and what have you.

I agree, the products are very complimentary in nature. We have very slight areas of overlap on some of the BI tools, but early on, weeks after the close of the acquisition, we said the strategic "going forward" investment area are the Business Objects BI tools, and the information management products are highly complimentary to the SAP portfolio, so we have a great combined offering that makes for beautiful EIM (Enterprise Information Management) story. Now with the Business Objects BI tools as the new face of BI for SAP, it is dramatically easier and very straightforward to get any and all data, answers, questions, out of BW and the transactional systems like SAP and R/3 MM and so forth.

If there's any overlap in the BI area, it certainly was in the tool space around the BEx tools. We're really clear that we're not going to invest further into the BEx tools themselves, but that transition we've roadmapped out, we've been very straightforward. As you probably know, Report Designer and Web Application Designer are products where we're not investing additional incremental resources. We certainly make sure those products are continuing to be available and maintained and supported because we want to make sure that SAP customers have investment protection. We're not pulling the rug out from under anyone, so that goes forward.

For BEx Analyzer, we have a really exciting story: we're combining the best of BEx Analyzer with the Business Objects Voyager OLAP tool set, and because we're combining the "best of" for SAP customers, it's going to be a really easy transition. Workbooks are going to be supported going forward, but they get the beautiful user experience and charting from the Business Objects tools, the multiple back-end connectivity into M SES and other OLAP back-ends, but combine that with a lot of the capabilities and features that SAP customers have been relying on for BEx Analyzer. That's the really short story in just a few minutes here.

Reed: I think that echoes with the customer mood that I've heard around these products, which is mostly optimism about improved reporting and analytics functionality. We do hear some concerns about phased-out products - you touched on a little bit of that today - as well as the expenses possible of taking advantage of the new product line. Are there any common questions or concerns around that that you'd like to clear up today?

Aman: Sure, I am certainly getting those questions from customers as well where they say, "Hey, what's the additional value added from the Business Objects tools - and haven't I paid for BI before?" So the really straight answers here are, first of all, there's a lot of capability within the Business Objects portfolio where there's no comparison or equal in the traditional Netware BI portfolio.

Just to pick a couple of examples: Polestar is an end-user tool that lets you discover data, and it's almost like a Google Earth-style view where you step back, you look at the data, you explore data. It's a true search-and-discovery tool for data, and there's no writing queries, there's no coding involved: you have to know nothing about the data structure and what's behind the data. You just type in what you're looking for, could be something like "Q3 revenues," and it will pull the data right out and show it to you, chart it for you, we do everything, so a true end-user can use those tools.

With the Business Objects BI tools, you are able to get BI to so many people in the organization; it's a self-service kind of model, you save IT cycles and you don't have to do a lot of coding around it. These are all capabilities that hadn't even been part of the traditional SAP Netware BI portfolio. In some areas, there are certainly comparable products, or at least from a functional capability perspective, you can make some comparisons, but, as I said, around OLAB, we're taking a combination of the best stuff forward. Around things like report design for formative reporting, Crystal Reports is the best in-market leading formative reporting tool; the capabilities and the ease of use are just the best, bar none, and it's market-leading.

Similar things around ad hoc reporting with web intelligence. There hasn't been an ad hoc reporting capability in the Netware BI portfolio, so this is something new for SAP customers that they get to leverage. In areas where there's some comparable capability, it's a huge step forward in terms of usability, ease of use, self-service capabilities. So we absolutely have seen that there is extra value, with SAP customers acknowledging that.

Look at what you get in terms of the complete package and the package pricing, where you can get complete bundles of that capability at a price. If you were to buy all the individual bits and pieces, even if you could then get all the stuff where capabilities were comparable for free, you would still be better off getting that package deal. So in terms of overall pricing and value to an SAP customer, I think it actually is a bargain and it's well worth it, especially in times like these where we have to be able to make good database decisions and figure out how to make confident decisions considering all the turmoil and crisis.

BI is a must-have. It's not even a competitive weapon; it's an essential to compete. So we really see that shift happening right now, and SAP customers can count on having the best toolset in the marketplace. We're leading in all categories and in-market share. SAP bought the No. 1 in the marketplace here, and this isn't just any BI portfolio. It certainly isn't your grandfather's BI; it has a lot of new web 2.0-style technology included.