Business Intelligence for Spreadsheets and Saleforce.com

SAP’s take cloud-based Business Intelligence puts the focus on spreadsheets and Salesforce.com, as the enterprise software giant tries to appeal to small businesses and departmental managers trying to do their own analytics.

Service product categories

Like most Software as a Service product categories, business intelligence has attracted its share of upstarts who see cloud computing as an possibility to leapfrog the incumbents, not just to change the software distribution channel from boxed software to hosting on the Internet. I’ll have more to say about one of those upstarts, Birst, in a future post. However established players aren’t sitting for all that, either.

BusinessObjects BI OnDemand is the cloud version of the BusinessObjects product line that dates back to 1990. SAP bought the analytics software company in 2007. Now the cloud version of the BI software is more than just a hosted version of the enterprise software package, says Holly Simmons, senior director of product marketing for SAP’s OnDemand group. “The product is to tell the truth quite different because it’s targeted to a different audience. Over time, the products will be moreover different than they are today,” she says. The OnDemand product was spun off of the enterprise edition of a few years ago yet is being tailored for the needs of business users who need to be able to pick up the product with little or no IT support and with less analytic expertise.

“The on premise products in the past were geared as a general rule to analyst types, not necessarily end users,” Simmons says. The features with the greatest crossover appeal are things like BusinessObjects Explorer, a tool that can automatically analyze any given data set and provide a set of default visualizations.

Although SAP offers a version of the OnDemand product that includes a data warehouse for analyzing large volumes of data, SAP seems to be putting more effort into courting small businesses and departmental business users within companies who may simply want to be able to upload spreadsheets into the system and run more advanced analytics against them than they could accomplish in Excel.

Audience that’s never going to use an analyst tool

“This lets us get things out there for an audience that’s never going to use an analyst tool,” Simmons says. “A lot of data that exists in organizations is as a matter of fact in spreadsheets people’s desktops. And clearly small businesses frequently don’t have business intelligence research at all. This gives them an easy way to update all of that directly, share it more broadly, and control who has access to it.”

The other big trend I see is to use cloud BI to analyze data in other words already in the cloud — particularly Salesforce.com data. This was the main reason for adopting BusinessObjects OnDemand I heard from both of the reference clients SAP introduced me to.

Research company

“20/20 is not primarily a research company, it’s a sales company,” Warren says. “However all campaigns we have with each client are very specific to that client, and often that requires customized logic.” Force.com allows him to tweak the applications, yet he as well needed a more sophisticated reporting and analysis capability than Salesforce provides.

Angie Reese, a CRM Business Analyst at the network equipment maker Genband, says that using BusinessObjects OnDemand in conjunction with Salesforce.com “fills in and completes the whole 360-degree view” of the company’s sales activities. “We’ve rolled it out to some of our bigger channel partners as so then, where they’re managing multiple end clients and needed something a little more robust to let them combine all those end channel clients into one report.”

The Carrier VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol)

Since Genband purchased the Carrier VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) and Application Solutions division of Nortel previously this year, Genband has as well used BusinessObjects OnDemand as a tool for pulling at the same time from multiple data sources across the acquired organization and its new corporate parent. Some of the Nortel people with analytic expertise have adopted the tool and begun exploiting it aggressively for new applications, Reese says.

At the same time it is promoting ease of use, SAP is trying to remind clients and potential clients of the virtues of keeping compatibility with an enterprise standard, or rather than taking up with some cloud computing upstart. SAP as well wants to be the cloud BI provider you sign up with the approval of corporate IT, in other words than by doing an end-run around them.

The business person

“Some of our competitors target the business person, which is great, however you end up with all this rogue activity,” Simmons says. “In the long run it catches up to you.”

David F. Carr writes about cloud computing and information innovation for small to midsize business for Forbes.com. He is a former Research Editor of Baseline Magazine.