SAP Solution Brief
SAP BusinessObjects Business
EXPLORE YOUR BUSINESS AT THE
SPEED OF THOUGHT
For effective decision making, your busi-
ness users require quick, easy answers
to off-the-cuff questions; better under-
standing of the business; and fast access
to relevant, quality information – and
they need it with minimal training or
dependency on IT. Yet the following
challenges stand in the way.
Traditional BI tools do not meet all
business users’ needs.
To make timely business decisions, busi-
ness users require simple and intuitive
access to corporate data from anywhere
in the organization. Unfortunately, tradi-
tional business intelligence (BI) tools
sometimes fail to meet the needs of
many business users. Often, BI tools
require significant training and under-
standing of analytical methods that users
simply do not have the time or patience
to take on – underscoring why BI adop-
tion among business users is so low.
According to one survey, less than 5%
of business users actually use BI tools
today – even though most of these busi-
ness users believe they do not have all
the information needed to make sound
decisions.
Instead, business users often rely on
intuition when making decisions. They
also depend on IT, which in turn faces a
backlog of requests that prevent timely
responses. Intuitive decisions and depen-
dence on IT support can result in an
underperforming organization, where
a poorly informed workforce guesses
at the right answers to key business
questions.
Intelligence
SAP BusinessObjects Explorer,
Accelerated Version
The accelerated version
of SAP® BusinessObjects™
Explorer software is a singu-
lar, unified offering that com-
bines intuitive information
search and exploration func-
tionality with high perfor-
mance and scalability.
Slow-running queries and unpredict-
able response times frustrate business
users.
Surveys show that slow query perfor-
mance and unpredictable response times
consistently are among the biggest com-
plaints of business users when working
with BI tools. As mission-critical enter-
prise applications feed new data into BI
systems, organizations see a dramatic
rise in volumes of new data. Data gen-
eration will certainly increase in the years
to come, making query performance and
response times even more challenging
to manage.
The impact on the end-user community
is significant, with productivity diminished
as users wait for queries to return results.
Since many users have yet to adopt self-
service BI, by default they are dependent
upon canned reports delivered by busi-
ness analysts or IT report authors. As a
result, they may base decisions on par-
tial or outdated data or simply not make
decisions within the required time frame.
IT faces an unmanageable workload,
spiraling costs, and fast-changing
business priorities.
Accustomed to the freedom and sim-
plicity of the Internet, business users
want the same self-service experience
from their BI solutions. However, if they
find BI tools difficult to use, they look to
IT for support. Thus, while dealing with
an explosive increase in data volume,
IT is challenged to meet the needs of
a growing BI user population, requiring
more resources to meet user expecta-
tions for fast access and quick response
time. Rather than support strategic
organizational needs, such as adapting
to fast-changing business priorities in
an increasingly competitive business
climate, scarce budget allocations and
resources wind up being spent on mun-
dane, low-value tasks so IT can optimize
and tune back-end systems.
Ultimately, IT can’t react quickly enough
to meet the dynamic needs of the orga-
nization while keeping costs within bud-
get. Therefore, organizations must find
new ways to bring intuitive, fast, and
cost-effective BI to everyone in the
enterprise.
Bringing Business Intelligence to
All Business Users
SAP offers value to your IT organization
with SAP® BusinessObjects™ Explorer
software, accelerated version. The
accelerated version empowers organi-
zations to extend the reach of BI to all
business users. With immediate insight
to a vast amount of data, your business
users can explore business at the speed
of thought – and they are better informed
and better equipped to make sound,
timely decisions. Ultimately, the solution
enables higher-performing organizations.
Use the Simplicity and Speed of
Internet Search
SAP BusinessObjects Explorer combines
the simplicity and speed of Internet
searches with high-performance and
instant response times, giving your
business users immediate answers to
ad hoc business questions. Now all users
can employ familiar business terms to
find relevant information that lies hidden
in both SAP and non-SAP data sources.
The solution presents the most relevant
search results first and provides addi-
tional, context-relevant details for further
exploration.
Data sources and metadata are prein-
dexed, so your users can search enter-
prise data sources such as operational
systems and data warehouses directly
and with near-instantaneous speeds.
The experience is as easy as browsing
an online store. No preexisting reports
or metrics are required.
Leverage Intuitive Data Exploration and
Visualization
Designed to be intuitive, data exploration
and visualization functionality enables
your business users to explore business
information in context. Simply clicking
on data automatically generates the
chart that best represents the informa-
tion. For example, when displaying per-
centage breakdowns of a multiple entry
data set, the software knows to gener-
ate a pie chart; when comparing multi-
ple members like revenue and profit,
it displays a bar chart. Your business
users benefit from the software’s self-
service discovery because they don’t
need to understand the data, where it
is located, or how it is structured. Addi-
tionally, your users can cut and paste
links to share insights with others via
e-mail and instant messaging applica-
tions. You can also export search-
and-exploration findings to Microsoft
PowerPoint and Microsoft Excel
applications.
Get Answers Fast with Predictable
Response Time
SAP BusinessObjects Explorer employs
high performance and scalability to give
your business users BI query response
times that are five times faster than highly
tuned queries – and up to 100 times
faster when compared to nontuned
BI queries. It provides these stunning
response times in a highly consistent
and predictable manner by creating highly
compressed index structures, which
load into memory whenever your users
request data. Using high-performance
aggregation techniques to process que-
ries in parallel entirely in memory, the
software can accommodate very large
data volumes across as much of the
data warehouse as you desire. Your
business users can enjoy greater flexi-
bility in the types of queries they make,
and they can access full historical data.
This functionality provides a significant
advantage over traditional data ware-
housing, in which maintenance-intensive
aggregations forced IT developers to
be selective about the BI functionality
and data sets they made available. In
those instances, only mission-critical
data and applications could be deployed
to a select few, leaving many users
deprived of meaningful insight and
widespread information access.
SAP BusinessObjects Explorer
Helps IT Achieve Success
In an ideal world, your IT team supports
change rather than acting as a bottle-
neck. It delivers intuitive, fast, self-service
information access to everyone in the
organization. But traditionally, the cost
of adding additional users and support-
ing more data is linearly incremental.
SAP BusinessObjects Explorer helps
you reduce operational overhead, pre-
serve capital investment, and minimize
implementation costs. Your IT team gains
a way to rapidly deploy and flexibly
administer BI applications while enabling
broad self-service information access
to everyone in the organization. And the
solution permits linear scaling to accom-
modate more users, data, and BI tools,
so you can add new groups of users at
relatively low costs.
Manage and Scale Your Applications
More Easily and Efficiently
Designed to be easy and efficient to
manage, the software accommodates
expanding volumes of data and users.
IT no longer needs to perform mundane,
low value–added tasks to optimize the
system. In-memory indexing reduces
the need for performance tuning – a
significant benefit, considering that up
to 20% of IT efforts in traditional BI proj-
ects are allocated to building and main-
taining the aggregates needed to cope
with expanding data volumes and grow-
ing user population.
Data modeling is crafted to be much
simpler with SAP BusinessObjects
Explorer. With more details managed
in information cubes, you achieve faster
deployment and reduce the need for
remodeling. In addition, the software
can reduce load times by as much as
80%. Tests have shown loading at rates
in excess of one terabyte per hour.
React Quickly to Business with Faster
Delivery
Traditional BI solutions required a hard-
ware vendor, a BI software vendor, and
a specialized consulting partner to imple-
ment the BI solution – and then tune
performance. Thanks to quick appliance
setup and configuration, zero aggregate
modeling, and simple activation, SAP
BusinessObjects Explorer shortens time
to delivery and heightens agility for IT.
Equipped with a rapidly deployable hard-
ware and software appliance, the soft-
ware is preinstalled by SAP technology
partners. Requiring minimal configura-
tion, there is no need to preaggregate
data for storage in information cubes;
aggregation occurs when users exe-
cute queries. SAP BusinessObjects
Explorer includes world-class SAP
BusinessObjects BI and information
management (IM) solutions, which are
designed to be quick to deploy and easy
to activate. You simply plug the com-
bined appliance into your existing infor-
mation management landscape with the
built-in SAP BusinessObjects IM solu-
tions, deploy your SAP BusinessObjects
BI solutions, and determine which infor-
mation spaces you wish to supercharge
and expose to business users.
Access Any Data Anywhere
There is no limit to the data you
can search for and explore with SAP
BusinessObjects Explorer. With embed-
ded extraction, transformation, and load
SAP BusinessObjects
Explorer helps you
reduce operational
overhead, preserve
capital investment, and
minimize implementa-
tion costs.
(ETL) functions, the software opens
high-performance exploration directly
across any heterogeneous data source
anywhere in the organization. Now
any employee can get a Google Earth–
like view of their data. You can use the
solution to essentially travel around
the entire world of your heterogeneous
corporate data and then drill down to
explore the information according to
parameters such as by geography, sup-
ply chain route, product line, or insurance
claim. This means that business users
across all industry segments – includ-
ing retail, consumer products, telecom-
munications, utilities, manufacturing,
and the public sector – can explore mil-
lions of rows of data with confidence in
high performance and scalability. With
SAP BusinessObjects Explorer, your
business users can access the informa-
tion they need when they need it.
Find Out More
To learn more about SAP
BusinessObjects Explorer and what
it can do for your company, visit
www.sap.com/solutions
/sapbusinessobjects/index.epx.
Quick facts www.sap.com /contactsap

Summary
The accelerated version of SAP® BusinessObjects™ Explorer software combines intuitive
information search and exploration functionality with high performance and scalability.

Business Challenges
• Improve end-user adoption of BI tools to enable fact-based decisions
• Improve query performance and response times to increase productivity and enhance
decision making
• Contend with spiraling IT costs and changing business priorities

Key Features
• Search across all data sources – Simply enter a few search keywords to find the most
relevant information instantly from across all data sources
• Contextual exploration – Gain additional contextually relevant details when searching;
no data model or data knowledge is required
• Automated relevancy and chart generation – Work with a solution that presents the most
relevant keyword search results first and automatically generates the chart that best
represents the information
• High performance and scalability – Take advantage of the high performance and scalability
you need for immediate answers across very large data sets
• A 360-degree view across any data anywhere – Fit into an existing enterprise information
management landscape and enable exploration of any mix of data sources anywhere in
the organization

Business Benefits
• Enables higher-performing organizations, thanks to pervasive BI and fact-based timely
decisions
• Allows IT to become a proactive business partner supporting and even driving
business changes, thanks to shorter time to delivery and heightened agility

For More Information

To learn more about SAP BusinessObjects business intelligence and information management
solutions, visit our Web site at www.sap.com/sapbusinessobjects.
50 094 877 (09/12)
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