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Hear about our experiences with a recent BOBJ 4.0 Ramp-Up project.

We recently had the pleasure of working with a global brand management company to evaluate a pre general release version of SAP Business Objects 4.0 – engaging with SAP in the ramp up program that is currently well underway. For AgilityWorks it was a great opportunity to install and configure a version 4 environment outside of our internal cloud based evaluation servers and connect to a productive SAP Business Warehouse environment.

It’s clear, after a wide ranging pilot with the ramp up version of 4.0, that the continued speculation of delayed releases on various forums is in part due to product quality issues from both an extended scope and the usual teething troubles of a product with significant enhancements such as this. SAP are clear that the software will only go into full distribution once a level of quality is gained that meets the high standards that customers will require to upgrade. And this is further compounded with features planned for service pack 1 being now within the scope of the planned first release – allowing SAP to recommend upgrading as soon as version 4 is generally available rather than the typical “wait until the first service pack” line. The Ramp up itself has now reached a level where key metrics have been met so we believe it’s a matter of a few weeks until the GA release hits the SAP Download Centre.

From our customers perspective the software delivers many advantages over their current, and rather dusty, Business Objects XIr3 environment. This is being underutilised due to a poor initial implementation due in part to SAP BW integration issues and in part a solution provider focusing far too much on look and feel at the expense of accurate and timely data delivery – both hampering initial adoption by the business. Our pilot implementation has been delivered using version 4.0 features such as WebIntelligence, Dashboard Designer and Advanced Analysis Web all delivered within the BI Workspace portal and has received a very positive response from Business and IT alike. One area of particular success was the usability of the workspace and all it’s content (including the flash!) on a mobile device – a Blackberry Playbook providing the platform. Although we had validated its abilities to consume BO4 content using an emulator it was great to get the real thing in hand. We also demonstrated an alpha version of the new mobile solution running on an iPad should there be an organisation to chose that platform for the executive/management teams.

With our customer now planning the next phase for development and rollout of their performance management project across specific brands we are placing our own BO4.0 focus on our internal evaluation servers. We utilise the Amazon Web Services (AWS) to host our cloud based internal servers giving us the ability to configure many deployment scenarios in a very short installation time. This has given us the ability to configure numerous version 4 environments to trial new features and also integrate with our internal ECC and BW environments for both security and data extraction. The SAP integration is, as one would expect, massively improved in version 4 with the new Advanced Analysis product impressing even our most hardened Business Explorer experts. We can now also attest to an upgrade process that has produced little in the way of issues. All of our prior version productive systems have been duplicated and taken through a trial upgrade as part of our ramp up activates and the low number of issues we have encountered with the more recent ramp up releases is testament to the version 4 project ethos of “Innovation without disruption”.