The truth is, SAP business intelligence isn’t hard to understand. Now, there’s no need to go over technical how-to stuff with this software, as that’s all more than documented on their websites, and in several downloadable PDFs they will not charge you for. With their library of these, you can even read about SAP’s internal database structure and command architecture. They’re pretty giving of information like this.
What I want to clear up about SAP business intelligence isn’t how it works on a technical level, or how to use the interface and features of this. No, I want to explain to you what BI software is, why it’s so useful, and why SAP’s brand of it is especially helpful.
BI Defined:
Business intelligence is a software system which monitors a whole lot of incoming data from the internet and a couple other public sources. Mainly, it uses the internet, though. Why wouldn’t it?
This software basically gauges how popular you are, how much people are talking about you, who they are, where it is they’re mentioning you, and all of that. It’s a window into how much presence you have in a market, and how good or bad of a presence it actually is. It’s similar to competitive intelligence, but more about spying on your own selves, rather than watching the actions and analytics pertaining to competitors.
Most of this information comes from search engine logistics (provided by the engines themselves), which can pull up mentions in blogs, forums and other such things.
Since individual mentions and the like on social networks rarely get indexed individually by these search engines, modern BI systems also hook into social networks through various specialized interfaces which can get the information.
Why SAP is Special:
Well, SAP is all about being more dynamic and heuristic with data processing and analysis, as well as providing a new kind of universally searchable and easy to control database structure. You can use it exclusively, or link its database to a number of other database types (even OEM databases from SaaS services like Salesforce and Netsuite), and use its more powerful but remarkably easy control layer to really seize full power over everything.
Now, in BI, this means that a metric ton of data being pulled cleverly from all over the web can be tabulated in one of the most dynamic and flexible database systems yet thought of, and it can work directly with other SaaS to implement this data in ways they can express, or pull from them as additional sources as well.
But I Have BI:
Maybe you do. Some systems offer BI functionality of their own. Salesforce has apps that do it, Netsuite has a BI suite optionally available, and so on. However, none of these are nearly as complete and flexible as this one.
SAP business intelligence is probably the most powerful and diverse BI system going right now, so while I am known to laud the app exchange’s offerings for Salesforce as making many dedicated task solutions obsolete ideologically, this time is an exception to the rule, absolutely. I definitely think this is something most businesses need.