In true Web 2.0 fashion, I’m attending the SAP TechEd event in Berlin by watching the virtual TechEd stream, with live coverage of the main keynotes and interviews in key areas. You can watch a replay yourself on the Virtual TechEd site.

The session started off with the new (excellent) “run better” SAP ad, featuring a wide selection of SAP customers:

Mark Yolton then stepped up on stage to welcome the crowd and members of the SAP Community Network. He emphasized the importance of people and community at the event — 15,000 attendees across the four locations, with over a thousand hours of lectures and on-hands sessions.

Next up was SAP CTO Vishal Sikka, who kicked off with a message designed to combat the positioning of various SAP competitors including Oracle: “People are looking for solutions, not stacks”. It’s now about the ecosystem, and it’s not possible for an ecosystem to come together on a single stack. Organizations need “non-disruptive” change. A stable core is important, but there has to be continuous evolution on top.

Vishal reiterated some of the messages from previous years, including the notion of “timeless software”, that allows you to innovate even with older platforms.

Vishal emphasized the continuing importance of SAP NetWeaver: “It’s the foundation of what we do”. He went over some of the numbers: 18,000 NetWeaver customers, 10,000 using BW, and 6,000 using the SAP Portal, many with more than 100,000 users, including the SAP community network itself with over 2 million members. “It’s alive, it’s kicking, and the numbers tell us that it’s not only being used to run the core infrastructure, but also extending it to their non-SAP applications. It’s strategic to our customers, and so it’s strategic to us.”

Vishal then invited Bjoern Goerke, in charge of the SAP NetWeaver platform, to discuss the new NetWeaver 7.3, due out later this quarter.

Bjoern explained how the NetWeaver team were delivering innovation without disruption into existing landscapes. Everything is now on the same release level, worked hard on maintainability, scalability, and performance – for example, reducing the downtime needed to install enhancement packs from several hours down to just a few minutes.

Next Vishal talked about the importance of Business Intelligence, and the upcoming release of SAP BusinessObjects 4.0 (project name “Aurora”). For the first time, all the clients tools have a common look and feel, and there’s improved integration with SAP Netweaver (identity management, BW, etc.).

The next subject was mobility. With Sybase, SAP is now the clear leader in enterprise mobility. There are now more than 4 billion mobile devices in the world, and Sybase is essential to using them. Over 2 billion messages are sent through Sybase systems every day (SMS, etc.), and Sybase recently crossed the threshold of a trillion messages through their servers. And Sybase also brings other great technology – their CEP (complex event processing) platform, the ASA and IQ databases will all be integrated into the NetWeaver framework.

He then invited Sam Yen on stage to show you how NetWeaver, BusinessObjects, and Sybase can work together.

The demonstration scenario was a series of Norwegian oil rigs, where there are sensors recording almost 600,000 events per minute, but there’s very low bandwidth between the rigs and the central offices, so  a lot of the processing has to be locally, and intelligently.

Suddenly, the oil production drops, and we can see the information in real-time using an Xcelsius (now BusinessObjects Dashboards) dashboard.

Let’s drill into the detail. We can see that Gate A was in the danger zone, and has been shut down.

What’s going on behind the scenes? Here’s the CEP development environment, that lets people easily create and change the real-time events that they would like to track and monitor

This is a very real need in oil and gas organizations today, but it takes a lot of painful programming. Because these systems are connected to NetWeaver, people can have these types of dashboards, running on top of Event Insight, as part of their enterprise portal.

Sam demonstrated the new SAP Enterprise Workspace, that users can customize with their own content, without any help needed from IT.

For example, he added the previous Event Insight dashboard, by choosing from the available applications…

And then simply dragging and dropping the module into the workspace.

Users have full ability to customize their experience including information from the outside world, etc.

Another example could be choosing vendors based on their carbon footprint. We look at the list of vendors:

And then he added a a sustainability module, using the functionality available in Carbon Impact.

Here’s the current version of Carbon impact shown within the portal:

Soon, SAP will be extending this functionality, with some of the products from the SAP BusinessObjects Innovation Center, such as Social Intelligence, in this case used in order to find sustainability experts inside my organization. People can easily do a search:

Find out how they are related to the rest of the organization:

And then invite them into the Enterprise Workspace.

Sam explained that the same portal and content can be made available for business partners outside the organization – Enterprise Workspaces in the cloud:

Vishal Sikka then moved from the improvements to existing products, such as NetWeaver, and BusinessObjects, to “New Horizons”, the new possibilities available in the future, with cloud computing, mobility, and in-memory computing: “On the one hand, we need continuous evolution. On the other hand, there are new possibilities – how to we bring fundamentally new solutions to the existing landscapes?”

Vishal outlined three big changes to technology possibilities:

(1) Cloud. There have been advances not only virtualization, but also in the ability to provision new services in public clouds. We need have the integrity of existing systems, AND improve the ease of consumption. How can we do that?

SAP want to bring the benefits of cloud computing to everyone, and the flagship product is Business ByDesign, which is not only a full suite for mid-size companies, but also the basis of the applications that SAP will deliver in the cloud.

Having a cloud platform lets us build applications, such as SAP StreamWork for collaboration and Carbon Impact, which runs on the Amazon Cloud.

(2) Mobile. Mobile internet use is already seven times the use of broadband. There are lots of new devices poised to join the market, including the RIM “PlayBook”. Users want a great experience. Vishal: “The screens want to be liberated from the tyranny of the desktop!”. What is possible?

There’s the Sybase Unwired platform that allows you to write applications once and deploy them to multiple platforms. And beyond the mobile devices, there are other platforms, such as SharePoint, Facebook, and Lotus Notes. The Gateway project was designed to make it easier to access SAP applications from these environments, as well as existing SAP systems back to R3 v 4.6C. It will be generally available later this year – you can already sign up for the ramp up program.

Microsoft and Cap Gemini recently worked together on an HR system for Microsoft that used the new Gateway functionality.

Representatives of the two companies explained that it enabled them to easily and quickly implement a new HR hiring application – something that is a critical application for Microsoft.

They explained that the application took about one-sixth of the time it normally would have done to implement, thanks to the Gateway functionality.

Sam Yen came back on stage to give a demonstration of the technology working together

He showed the end to end traceability of the SAP application within a SharePoint portal:

He explained that Gateway makes it easy to consume SAP data, no matter what front end you are using – for example, using a Macintosh.

Sam showed how you could create and start consuming SAP data on an iPad in less than two minutes. First, you choose the data you want to expose:

And in what form you would like to expose it:

Then you can use the standard Apple environment to compile an application:

And make it available to the iPad – in this case a simple employee search using information from the SAP HR database:

The last topic was in-memory computing, described by Vishal as a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity”.

He explained that the current hardware possibilities were pretty much unimaginable ten years ago. With multi-core processing, software vendors have to rewrite their software to take advantage of parallelism, but once they have, the possibilities are amazing: real-time access to information, at a lower cost.

He gave an example of what’s possible, explaining that at a previous event in Berlin, in July, the CTO of one of the largest CPG companies in the world had challenged him to help them predict demand for their products at a row level – they had 460 billion records. Vishal put a team on it, and found that not only was it possible to access the data, it could be done 20x faster than anything the customer had previously tried. 460 billion records of data was about 45 terabytes. Compressed into a column database, it was around three to five terabytes. They put together a machine with ten server blades for around $530,000 using standard Intel parts.

The new HANA product is available for ramp up on November 30th, and he invited the audience to take part. One of the first customers is already in a pilot, running live. Vishal explained that the future direction is to “revitalize our entire product portfolio, starting with new applications – planning, forecasting, simulations”. He gave the example of utility companies using it to monitor and react to information from smart meters in real time.

Sam Yen came back on stage to give some examples.

The first was accessing over 4 billion rows of data in less than 0.03seconds, using HANA and the BusinessObjects Explorer front end.

The second example showed how you can get real-time access to live application data. He showed an SAP internal application for pipeline data. Here’s the initial view, seen on an iPad using BusinessObjects Explorer for iPad:

He then went into the SAP system to change some of the pipeline values, in a database containing half a million records. The data is then replicated to the HANA box in real-time using Sybase Replication services.

The simulation would normally take several hours to run, but now the data is reflected on the iPad in seconds:

Vishal finished with a high-level summary of the themes of his presentation: Innovation without disruption, through the new NetWeaver and BusinessObjects products, and the new possibilities afforded by the cloud, mobile use, and in-memory analytics.

Based on a blog post and proof-of-concept application earlier this year, I have been championing a SAP BusinessObjects Innovation Center project to build an “augmented corporate reality” prototype.

The idea stemmed from one of the key themes of my BI future directions presentations: that for the first time in centuries, new technology comes from the consumer world, not from governments and businesses, and so we need to adapt and adopt these technologies for corporate use.

The mobile telephone is starting to become a “universal pointing device”: using the phone’s GPS location and compass, it knows where you are, and what you’re looking at. There is now a wide range of augmented reality mobile applications available on the market that help people find the nearest pizzeria, get information about a monument, or locate local twitter users.

How could this functionality be used in the business world? My first proof-of-concept blog post imagined examples of a manager getting information about a particular retail operation, a factory foreman getting maintenance records of machinery, and comparing sales between two different areas of a retail store.

These examples spurred a lot of conversations with customers around the globe about possible applications:

• An oil company interested in getting information about equipment in refineries
• A car manufacturer interested in providing information to managers of sales dealerships
• A consumer goods company interested in tracking information and location of their vending machines

Based on those conversations, we have been able to validate the core concepts and refined the functionality of our prototype. The result is an iPhone / iPad application that works closely with the SAP BusinessObjects Explorer technology and the BI onDemand web site.

Before I tell you more about it, let me emphasize: it’s a prototype, not a product. The SAP BusinessObjects innovation center is modeled on Google Labs. We’re taking a transparent, Web 2.0 approach to innovation. Rather than working for years in some dark room and then unveiling a completed product, the team creates iterative prototypes and make them freely available for download, so that you can test them, use them, and give us feedback. They’re free, but not supported, and we give no guarantees that they will be developed further. The idea is that not-so-good ideas sink without wasted development, while good ideas get refined before turning into real products (our track record is very good: mobile BI, the Explorer product, and many features of the current BusinessObjects platform all started off as prototypes).

And please note that everything I mention below may change over time, based on your feedback. We are in the process of refining the prototype, and hope to make it available for you to download and use in the next few weeks or months.

How it works

You upload a data set that includes Point of Interest (POI) information to the BusinessObjects OnDemand platform at bi.ondemand.com (you can sign up for a free account), set some data configuration options, then access that data set from your iPhone or iPad. The prototype works out what information to display based on your location and the phone’s compass heading:

The prototype uses five fields of information to define the “points of interest” (POIs) that can be viewed: latitude, longitude, name, an associated image, and at least one data value.

Demonstration Screen Shots

First we install the Augmented Reality Explorer application (currently, this involves a specific build for identified devices – we will make it a free download from the Apple App Store as soon as we can). We then open up the application on the iPhone, and log into a BI OnDemand account:

We choose an appropriately-configured data source. The points of interest are then automatically displayed based on your location: you can choose to see either the closest POI first, or the one closest to the direction you are pointing your phone. The icons are configurable — in this case, I’m using them to indicate the current state of sales: the arrow indicates whether current sales are larger than the previous period, and the color indicates whether the current sales are above, equal to, or below the current sales targets.

We can choose to display the points on a map, and zoom in to get more detail by tapping on the radar to make it full screen, and sliding a finger to choose the radius of distance we’re interested in:

I can also view the points of interest superimposed on the real world, using the iPhone’s camera – as I move around, each POI seems to hover over its physical location, and I can choose what information is displayed as each point is selected:

At any time, I can choose to filter the points by any of the dimensions available in the data set, and clicking on a POI takes me through to the same interface as the BusinessObjects Explorer application. Any filters that are applied in the augmented reality view are applied to the Explorer view, and vice-versa, so I can easily and simply explore the information available (and it could be many millions of rows of data, if you’re using SAP BusinessObjects Explorer Accelerated)

And the prototype looks great on the iPad, too (the camera view is not available, obviously):

Other thoughts:

• The possible uses are currently limited by the precision of the location services of the iPhone/iPad (GPS, cell tower triangulation, wifi triangulation). It works very well outdoors with GPS, but using cell-towers only tells you where you are within a few blocks (which is good enough to locate the nearest retail branch, but not for comparing one aisle of a supermarket with another). Various companies such as SkyHook and Cisco are working on increasing the available precision.
• The Augmented Explorer prototype can also directly access a corporate Explorer server, with an appropriately formatted data set
• The BusinessObjects data quality solutions include location coordinates for just about any address in the world. In an ideal world, you’d be able to submit a file with addresses, and we’d turn it into coordinates on the fly, and that’s something we’ll be looking into in the future. In the meantime, there are other free solutions out there.
• Note that the locations that you’re looking at don’t have to be static: imagine pointing your device to get information about cars, trucks, or people (e.g. combining it with information from the Social Network Analyzer prototype). In the short term, data latency getting information into Explorer would be an issue, but better BI on event information will improve this area, too…

Next steps:

If you have an questions, comments, or feedback, or feel like you have a good case for getting a copy of the application even before we post it to the App Store (e.g. you’re an SAP employee with a customer who might be interested), feel free to contact me or the SAP BusinessObjects innovation center team directly. We’re particularly interested in finding real-world scenarios for this (it’s not about doing something just for the sake of the technology).

Early press coverage:

• SAP working on augmented reality for business, Jennifer Scott, IT Pro, July 8, 2010
• Q&A: Timo Elliott, BI evangelist at SAP, Jennifer Scott, IT Pro, July 9, 2010
• SAP working on augmented reality for business, TechCentral (Ireland), July 12, 2010
• SAP working on augmented reality for business, Leo King (Computerworld UK), Network World, July 9, 2010

France has a plan to put the latest 2.0 technology at the service of its citizens called Le France Numérique 2012. It outlines how the government intends to:

• Provide everybody access to digital networks and services
• Develop and provide new digital services
• Grow the number and usage of digital services by companies, government departments, and individuals
• Modernize the governance of the digital economy

As part of the plan, Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, the French Deputy Minister for the Development of the Digital Economy launched a call last spring for innovative web initiatives. One of the selected projects, led by SAP Research, is called ARSA (“Analyse des Réseaux Sociaux pour les Administrations”, social network analysis for government authorities).

The project uses the Social Network Analyzer (SNA) technology from the SAP Business Objects Innovation Center to improve collaboration and government transparency in the public sector, laying the foundations for “Administration 2.0”.

A press conference this morning in SAP’s Paris headquarters hosted by Vincent de Poret outlined the project’s goals. Gilles Logeais, the Research Director for SAP Research France, explained that the two-year, €1.3M project will be carried out in partnership with the town of Antibes on the French Riviera, chosen as a representative mid-sized French town, with around 75,000 inhabitants and a wide variety of public services.

With help from students of the prestigious Ecole Centrale Paris engineering school, and a local cloud computing platform partner, Euclyde, the team will research how best to use social network analysis technology for government departments and local authorities, in order to:

• Optimize collaboration within public-sector organizations
• Improve transparency and convenience for citizens accessing services (who does what)
• Improve the ability of public-sector organizations to understand and react to the needs of citizens (who needs what)

Vincent de Poret, Cedric Ulmer, Alexis Naibo, and Gilles Logeais of SAP

Alexis Naibo of the SAP BusinessObjects Innovation Center gave a demonstration of the SNA technology, explaining how it can import data from a wide variety of sources including internal business applications, corporate databases, and external interfaces. Once the data has been gathered, people can search for experts and discover relationships using an intuitive interface.

Today’s organizations are increasingly complex, with frequent reorganizations and many cross-functional teams and initiatives. The result is that the standard corporate hierarchy, which is often the only relationship information available, rarely reflects how people really work together. Many people today are active members of professional social networks such as LinkedIn or Viadeo, and want it to be as easy to find an internal contact as it is externally.

SNA has the potential to gives a more complete, 360 degree view of collaboration in the organization, leveraging the knowledge already embedded in corporate applications such as human capital management, customer relationship management, and project management systems.

The prototype makes it easy to understand existing relationships between people in much the same way that traditional business intelligence systems help organizations understand data stored in their corporate systems.

Unlike consumer-oriented social network tools that only support one type of relationship between individuals (“I know X”) and a limited, predefined collection of data attributes, SNA supports multiple different types of relationships between both individuals and groups, and organizations can easily adapt and extend the information and links contained in each individual’s profile.

Anything technology that touches on relationships between people requires sensitive handling, and SNA is designed to meet all the technical, legal, and organizational requirements for data security and governance, by incorporating fine-grained control over information access. In addition, the platform is designed to fit seamlessly into existing environments, supporting standards such LDAP and Google’s OpenSocial, and with integration to mobile devices and corporate email accounts.

Alexis explained that the prototype has been implemented as a beta project within SAP and has proved very popular with employees. As a standard part of the internal company portal, all SAP’s approximately 50,000 staff have access to the solution, and it is used thousands of times each week.

An open SNA demonstration is available online for anybody would like to understand the technology, at http://sna-demo.ondemand.com

SAP is still investigating how best to package and commercialize the SNA prototype, but there has been considerable interest from potential customers, notably as a seamless part of specific SAP business vertical and functional applications.

Cedric Ulmer, the research project lead for SAP, explained that town of Antibes, like any other organization, needs to work as efficiently as possible, but as a public organizations must also be as transparent as possible with its citizen customers. The first phase of the project will be to adapt the SNA technology to the town’s particular needs. Cedric cited some applications that might be of interest, such as:

• Understanding the complex links between the local authority and the many different suppliers that compete for public contracts, and the relationship between those different suppliers
• How the local authority can best collaborate with the wide range of different local associations (sporting associations, business groups, etc.) to meet the broader needs of local citizens

Other articles:

• A social network for the French Administration, by SAP (in French) (Google Translate version)
• SAP wants to build a social network for the French Administration (in French) (Google Translate version)
• SAP and Antibes implement social networking (in French) (Google Translate version)

Antibes image adapted from original photo by Valeria Cerutti

There’s increasing awareness that collaboration with customers, partners, and other experts is essential in order to build the right products in the future. To do this, SAP has built a community ecosystem for innovation. In addition to the community sites for individuals to share information about industry expertise, business processes, SAP development, and SAP BusinessObjects, there are two technology lab organizations dedicated to getting input from the community around new SAP products and directions: the SAP BusinessObjects Labs, and the SAP Co-Innovation Labs.

SAP BusinessObjects Innovation Center

The SAP BusinessObjects Innovation Center, modeled after the Google Labs, showcases new software prototypes based on concepts and ideas from customers, partners, and internal teams. Anybody is free to download and try them, but they are not supported for production environments. Feedback is encouraged, and used to improve the products and decide which are commercialized. Lab “graduates” that have been commercialized include Mobile BI, Information on Demand, Polestar, and BI Widgets. In addition, the Lab works with academics in both US and Europe to constantly push forward the limits of productive information use.

The Innovation Center is not only about taking a Web 2.0 approach to innovation — many of the prototypes themselves have a distinctly Web 2.0 flavor. I have listed several of the most exciting projects below.

The Xcelsius Web 2.0 add-ons allow Xcelsius users to incorporate tag clouds and interactive relationship charts into dashboards (these are working Xcelsius models – move the slider, or click on the members of the network).

Polestar in the cloud is a hosted version of the commercially-available SAP BusinessObjects Polestar product that lets you try out the intuitive Polestar interface with your own Excel spreadsheets. Simply upload a simple Excel file with a header row and columns of data and then start slicing and dice information.

Comment it lets users of the SAP BusinessObjects intelligence platform comment on reports, adding them to a new transparent layer — users can not only share reporting and analytic information but also their feedback and discussions.

Catalog Browser for the iPhone lets you remotely access your favorite BusinessObjects content from the Apple iPhone. You can easily browse, search and display the Crystal Reports, Web Intelligence and Desktop Intelligence documents, and maintain a list of favorite documents.

The Text to Query prototype appears to perform magic, using the information already stored in BusinessObjects metadata. As you create a PowerPoint presentation or email, Text to Query can examine the text, spot keywords, and automatically offer chart suggestions (containing real enterprise data) that can augment. As you write about the revenue rising in a particular region, the prototype automatically brings up the revenue chart for that area.

The BISense prototype is similar – it makes it easy to integrate relevant BI content automatically into web pages. So if you have an internal web site where information is organized by product, for example, you can have a list of relevant reports display automatically for each product.

The Content Rating prototype lets people rate and share their opinions on published BI content in a collaborative manner, and can be used to “validate” reports as they go into production use.

 
Data Feed as a Universe lets users of SAP BusinessObjects WebIntelligence combine any information from RSS feeds and Web Services with corporate data from your operational systems and data warehouses (as well as CSV and Excel files).

Business Objects Masher lets developers create “templates” that can be used to create enterprise mashups that combine corporate data with web application resources like Yahoo! Maps, Google Maps or other types of visualization.

Other links for the BusinessObjects Innovation Center

• Subscribe to Business Objects Labs RSS feed 
• Give feedback to the labs team 
• View a presentation about the labs
• Presentation download

SAP Co-Innovation Lab

Zia Yusuf and Henning Kagermann open the Co-Innovation Lab

In June 2007, SAP launched the Co-Innovation Lab in Palo Alto, California, in order to foster greater collaborative innovation with customers and partners.

The lab features a simulated, heterogeneous data center, with hardware and infrastructure software from different vendors, including HP, Cisco, Intel, VMware, and Citrix. The lab provides a testing ground for new business solutions and technologies — lab members can quickly configure the data center in any number of ways in order to accurately replicate real-world challenges.

The lab provides a place for cooperation between different partners, along with SAP subject-matter expertise, training rooms, briefing center, and innovation documentation created with ecosystem partners and customers. In particular, the labs have collected and shared expertise on the virtualization of SAP installations – an important step in the cloud-hosted future.

Like most communities in the SAP ecosystem, the lab makes extensive use of virtual collaboration, leveraging Web 2.0 tools like Wikis, blogs, team spaces, and Webinars. For example, as part of the labs initiative, a Community Advisory Group was created with the charter to “Enable customers to embrace enterprise SOA while honoring their existing SOA investments and create a mutual understanding of Partners and SAPs approach to SOA”

Other Co-Innovation Lab Links

• SAP Co-Innovation Lab Solution Brief  
• How to get involved with the lab
• SAP Communities of Innovation: Co-Innovation Lab