[UPDATE: See this post for the soon-to-be released prototype from the SAP BusinessObjects Innovation Center]

Here’s an example of “augmented corporate reality” based on the Layar platform and the SAP BusinessObjects ondemand.com platform, running on a Google Nexus One Android phone.

These are all screenshots taken from a working proof of concept, shown as an example of the type of functionality business users might have access to in the future — not with any promise of such a product in the future.

Open the Layar application, look at the list of available “layers”, and choose the SAP Web 2.0 Augmented Corporate Reality Example
The application opens the camera’s phone, and connects to a business intelligence server to get information about the customer businesses closest to the current location. This information is shown in the small radar screen in the top right, and an icon for each customer is shown on the screen. As the phone moves, the icons appear to stay in one place, hovering over the physical location of that customer’s building. Each icon indicates the customer’s sales performance (the arrow direction shows the trend, the color indicates whether or not sales have reached my target or not). The size of the icon indicates roughly how near or far the office is. The application automatically highlights the location closest to the center of the display, and shows more information about that business (name, distance, photo, current and previous sales, and sales target)
Users can click on the selector in the top left to see the customers as a list, ordered by distance from the current location (realistically, this is likely to be the easiest, most popular location-aware information use)
Alternatively, we can see the customers, and their performance icons, shown overlaid on a map.
When the user clicks on one of the icons, they see more data about that business, and can click on the “Get Data” button to drill in for more information.
This takes them to a live report hosted on the SAP BusinessObjects on-demand business intelligence environment…
…where they can drill into the numbers, open other reports and charts, etc.

We hope to open up the prototype for use by others, with the ability to add other example locations, etc.

What could businesses really do with this? Well, maybe you’re a branch manager, and you want to get the latest sales figures as you visit the branch:

Or a factory manager who wants to see the maintenance records for a particular machine:

Or you’d like to compare performance of goods displayed inside the store with the goods stored in the shop window:

What you can do with this technology is currently restricted by the location services: realistically, it works well for identifying building locations outdoors using GPS, but is not yet precise enough for most indoor use. However, this is changing fast as vendors offer new location services, based on cell-phone, wifi, and other forms of signal triangulation.

How far could this go? Well… take a look at this video:

SAP today announced new collaboration agreements that allow SAP Business ByDesign users to more easily leverage web services from third-party providers, including:

Business and investment news. Users can access investment research and other data from Hoover’s, Morningstar, and Business Wire, Google News, and Google Finance, and combine it with their own information about customers and suppliers.

Mapping and address services. Users can map and route customers, suppliers and other contacts using services from Google Maps, MapQuest.com, Navteq/Map24, and Falk online.

Search. Users can leverage Google Web Search, and Google Product Search, and GoYellow.de, a German service that allows reverse phone lookup functionality.

Further web services are planned to be introduced in the next release of Business By Design in Q3 of 2009.

Frustratingly, no information was available about the extent of integration with these services, and how customers could proceed. As Chris Kanaracus reported in his article SAP adds Web Services to Business by Design:

It wasn’t immediately clear how deep the integrations are between the services and BBD. This is a key point, said Forrester Research analyst Ray Wang.

Just being able to call out to Google Maps from within the ERP suite has limited value, Wang said. But if the system could use sales data contained in BBD to create a “heat map” showing the hottest territories, “that would be pretty cool,” he said.

At some point more information may be available on Web Services area of the Business ByDesign marketplace (registration required). For now, it contains roughly the information as the press release.

Google has posted videos of all the sessions at the recent Google I/O 2009 developer’s conference.

SAP attended as part of the session on “OpenSocial in the Enterprise”). Overall, the session was a little disorganized and meandering, but it did end up giving an overview of what companies like IBM, Oracle, SalesForce.com, and Atlassian are doing to leverage social networking technologies such as OpenSocial within organizations:

• Mark Weitzel gave a demo of the IBM Mashup Center proof of concept, allowing you to create mashup pages, using messaging between different sources (based on OpenAjax, but can integrate with OpenSocial) (link directly to this demo)
• Rich Manalang from Oracle gave a demonstration of Oracle’s internal collaboration system, called “Oracle Connect”. (link directly to this demo)
• Dave Carroll of Salesforce.com showed how they have been working with customers to add collaboration to the CRM experience (link directly to this demo)
• Mike Cannon-Brookes of Atlassian showed how OpenSocial could be used to link enterprise applications, and between applications and gmail. For more, see http://atlassian.com/opensocial (link directly to this demo)

The highlight of the session (OK, so I’m biased) was a demonstration by John Mayerhofer, VP, Standards Strategy Group of SAP, showing the Social Network Analyzer technology (see below, or link directly to this demo)

Unfortunately, not much time was left for Q&A session. The most interesting question was about “What are the barriers to social systems in the enterprise?” and the answers included a mix of technical and social concerns:

• Security and identity were mentioned as special problems.
• There was some frustration than social networking APIs don’t take into account enterprise needs.
• Exposure to the consumer social networks actually leaves a negative impression, people fear that it’s just about socializing, rather than collaborating.
• Everybody agreed that it was early days
• The session ended with a hopelessly vague question/comment about needing to “liberate users” rather “concentrating on the enterprise”.