SAP Broadens Analytics Reach With New Stake in Data Discovery and Visualization Market

ORLANDO, Fla., May 16, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced intuitive software that turns data into answers for people across organizations. SAP® Visual Intelligence software allows employees, departments and lines of business to creatively visualize and analyze information and apply it to individual and group decision-making. A desktop version of SAP BusinessObjects Explorer® software, SAP Visual Intelligence is powered by the SAP HANA® platform and empowers users to perform data discovery regardless of technical skill level. With the new application, business users can take advantage of existing data investments that their IT organizations have built and maintained without tasking IT to produce reports. The announcement was made at SAPPHIRE® NOW, being held in Orlando, Florida, May 14-16, 2012.

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No matter where users sit in a company, they want a way to easily explore, mash up and share information to make better decisions and find new opportunities — without having to task IT to deliver reports. Companies are also looking to maximize existing business intelligence (BI) investments; expanding access allows more people to take advantage of a wealth of existing data and systems to make better-informed decisions.

"The category of visual data discovery has become a must-have component of the BI tool portfolio and SAP has upped its capabilities with its latest product, SAP Visual Intelligence," said Cindi Howson, founder, BI Scorecard. "Ease of use, time to insight and business agility are key reasons for the rapid growth of visual data discovery that provides users with greater self service with minimal IT support. SAP BusinessObjects Explorer provided ease of use, but the release of SAP Visual Intelligence brings greater flexibility and richer analysis."

"3M is a diversified company consisting of six different businesses units operating across various industries globally. As a result, we are a data-rich organization that relies on SAP to deliver intuitive BI solutions," said Jeff Robinson, IT manager, Global Business Intelligence, 3M.  "SAP Visual Intelligence puts our people in the driver's seat because they can truly discover data on the fly. And because SAP handles the work of combining multiple data sources backed by in-memory technology, self-service analysis hits our users' screens in seconds."

Empowering Users in Any Industry or Line of Business to Explore Data and Find Answers

SAP Visual Intelligence draws upon the company's expertise in 24 industries, 10 lines of business and global footprint to deliver a product that any company can use to deliver answers to users everywhere. For example:

• A loan officer at a bank might wonder how the bank is performing regionally across multiple categories of loans and demographics. Typically this would involve intensive efforts downloading and bringing together information from corporate as well as public data sources to find answers, which would be done manually each time a refresh is needed. SAP Visual Intelligence enables the loan officer to create an automated routine to download census information, combine it with regional loan data as well as additional region and state details to enrich the data. The information could be immediately plotted on a map to discover that loan business had increased 25 percent in the past two years for high-income earners in a specific zip code but new loan applications had slowed significantly. At the next meeting, the team could put together a new campaign targeting sales of loans in the high income areas.
• A regional manager for a healthy snack company might be tasked with increasing sales of a new health bar in the western region. Working with a business analyst and SAP Visual Intelligence, the regional manager could easily access sales numbers for the last three years and combine this with point of sale data to see that the majority of sales were coming from small stores running a new campaign. On the spot, the regional manager and business analyst could expand the campaign to a broader market and eliminate poorly performing campaigns.
• Responsible for analyzing the numbers of defects across plants and suppliers, a business analyst at a global manufacturing firm could use SAP Visual Intelligence to pull enterprise data as well as external data files sent by suppliers. A mash up of the data might reveal that specific parts and one particular supplier are responsible for 80 percent of the defects. As a result, the engineering team could work with the supplier on correcting the issues.

Fast, Engaging Way of Finding Answers Buried in Massive Amounts of Data

Building on SAP BusinessObjects Explorer, SAP Visual Intelligence leverages SAP HANA to help users ignite their creativity with beautiful and interactive visualizations, allowing them to ask any question without the need for predefined queries, reports or dashboards. SAP Visual Intelligence removes roadblocks to information so business users can find real-time answers on any volume of data. The engaging interface increases the usage of data and ability to derive answers and make better decisions. SAP Visual Intelligence enables ad-hoc discovery everywhere, across all data — from spreadsheets to sales, finance, marketing, customer, social, geo-location, third-party and other business data.

Analytics Innovations Revolutionize the Decision-Making Process

Recognized as the BI market share leader by Gartner, today's announcement is another of example of SAP's commitment to investing and expanding its analytics portfolio to respond to the needs of customers and the market. Recently announced SAP® BusinessObjects™ Predictive Analysis software is intended to help users improve decision-making by predicting future outcomes. Additional planned enhancements to SAP BusinessObjects BI solutions aim to deliver more mobile analytics options, richer insight, improved collaborative decision-making and deeper SAP applications integration. The improved capabilities are planned to help companies extract the most business value from the massive amounts of data that are generated today.

"SAP Visual Intelligence revolutionizes decision-making by offering every person in an organization a fast and extremely easy to use  way of discovering answers from any data," said John Schweitzer, senior vice president and general manager, Analytics, SAP. "SAP solutions for analytics empower people with precise information anytime and anywhere using beautiful visualizations, enabling rapid response to events as they unfold. SAP delivers a powerful and comprehensive analytics portfolio that helps companies adapt to constant change so they can achieve remarkable results."

For more information and demos about SAP Visual Intelligence, visit www.experienceexplorer.com. For a closer look, see: "Screenshots: SAP Broadens Analytics Reach."

For announcements, blog posts, videos and other coverage during SAPPHIRE NOW, visit the Events Newsroom.

SAPPHIRE® NOW

With SAPPHIRE® NOW, SAP offers its customers, partners and prospects even more opportunities to engage in dialogue with peers, participants and thought leaders around the globe. Being held in Orlando, Florida, May 14-16, 2012, this enhanced, real-time event connects attendees on site with global participants through state-of-the-art broadcast studios and an online experience that incorporates the latest social media and community functionality. Whether on site or online, participants can gain insight as to how SAP is delivering on its product strategy and helping organizations around the world to run better. For more information, visit www.sapphirenow.com. Follow SAPPHIRE NOW on Twitter at @SAPPHIRENOW and visit the Events Newsroom at www.events.news-sap.com.

About SAP

As market leader in enterprise application software, SAP (NYSE: SAP) helps companies of all sizes and industries run better. From back office to boardroom, warehouse to storefront, desktop to mobile device – SAP empowers people and organizations to work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively to stay ahead of the competition. SAP applications and services enable more than 190,000 customers (includes customers from the acquisition of SuccessFactors) to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and grow sustainably. For more information, visit www.sap.com.

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