For effective decision making, your information workers require quick, easy answers to off-the-cuff questions; better understanding of the business; and fast access to relevant, quality information - and they need it with minimal training or dependency on IT.

1. SAP Solution Brief
SAP BusinessObjects
Business Intelligence
SAP BusinessObjects Explorer
EXPLORE YOUR BUSINESS
Your SAP® BusinessObjects™
AT THE SPEED OF THOUGHT Explorer solution is a singular,
unified offering that combines
intuitive information search
and exploration functionality
For effective decision making, your Slow-running queries and unpredict-
with high performance
information workers require quick, easy able response times frustrate and scalability.
answers to off-the-cuff questions; bet- business users.
ter understanding of the business; and
fast access to relevant, quality informa- Surveys show that slow query perfor-
tion – and they need it with minimal mance and unpredictable response
training or dependency on IT. Yet the times consistently are among the
following challenges stand in the way: biggest complaints of information work-
ers when working with BI tools. As
Traditional BI tools do not meet all mission-critical enterprise applications
information workers’ needs. feed new data into BI systems, organiza-
tions see a dramatic rise in volumes of
To make timely business decisions, new data. Data generation will certainly
information workers require simple increase in the years to come, making
and intuitive access to corporate data. query performance and response times
Unfortunately, traditional business even more challenging to manage.
intelligence (BI) tools sometimes fail
to meet the needs of many information The impact on the end-user community
workers. Often, BI tools require is significant, with productivity dimin-
significant training and understanding ished as users wait for queries to return
of analytical methods that users simply results. Since many users have yet to
do not have the time or patience to adopt self-service BI, by default they
take on – underscoring why BI adoption are dependent upon canned reports
among information workers is so low. delivered by business analysts or IT
According to one survey, less than report authors. As a result, they may
5% of information workers actually use base decisions on partial or outdated
BI tools today – even though most of data, or simply not make decisions
these business users believe they do within the required timeframe.
not have all the information needed
to make sound decisions. IT faces an unmanageable workload,
spiraling costs, and fast-changing
Instead, knowledge workers often rely business priorities.
on intuition when making decisions.
They also depend on IT, which in turn Accustomed to the freedom and sim-
faces a backlog of requests that prevent plicity of the Internet, business users
timely responses. Intuitive decisions want the same self-service experience
and dependence on IT support can from their BI solutions. However, if they
result in an underperforming organiza- find BI tools difficult to use, they look
tion, where a poorly informed workforce to IT for support. Thus, while dealing
guesses at the right answers to key with explosive increase in data volume,
business questions. IT is challenged to meet the needs of

2. a growing BI user population, requiring Use the Simplicity and Speed of the software’s self-service discovery
more resources to meet user expecta- Internet Search because they don’t need to understand
tions for fast access and quick SAP BusinessObjects Explorer com- the data, where it is located, or how it
response time. Rather than support bines the simplicity and speed of Inter- is structured. Additionally, your users
strategic organizational needs, such net searches with high-performance can cut and paste links to share
as adapting to fast-changing business and instant response times, giving your insights with others via e-mail and
priorities in an increasingly competitive information workers immediate instant messaging applications. You
business climate, scarce budget answers to ad hoc business questions. can also export search-and-exploration
allocations and resources wind up Now, all users can employ familiar busi- findings to Microsoft PowerPoint and
being spent on mundane, low-value ness terms to find relevant information Microsoft Excel applications.
tasks so IT can optimize and tune that lies hidden in both SAP and non-
backend systems. SAP data sources. The solution pres- Get Answers Fast with Predictable
ents the most relevant search results Response Time
Ultimately, IT can’t react quickly enough first and provides additional, context- SAP BusinessObjects Explorer
to meet the dynamic needs of the orga- relevant details for further exploration. employs high performance and scalabil-
nization while keeping costs within ity to give your business users BI query
budget. Therefore, organizations must Data sources and metadata are pre- response times that are five times
findnew ways to bring intuitive, fast, indexed, so your users can search faster than highly tuned queries – and
and cost-effective BI to everyone in enterprise data sources such as opera- up to 100 times faster when compared
the enterprise. tional systems and data warehouses to non-tuned BI queries. It provides
directly and with near-instantaneous these stunning response times in a
Bringing Business Intelligence to speeds. The experience is as easy as highly consistent and predictable man-
All Information Workers browsing an online store. No preexist- ner by creating highly compressed
ing reports or metrics are required. index structures, which load into mem-
SAP offers value to your IT organiza- ory whenever your users request data.
tion with the SAP® BusinessObjects™ Leverage Intuitive Data Exploration Using high-performance aggregation
Explorer solution. The solution empow- and Visualization techniques to process queries in paral-
ers organizations to extend the reach Designed to be intuitive, data explora- lel entirely in memory, the software can
of BI to all information workers. With tion and visualization functionality accommodate very large data volumes
immediate insight to a vast amount of enables your business users to explore across as much of the data warehouse
data, your business users can explore business information in context. Simply as you desire. Your business users can
business at the speed of thought – and clicking on data automatically gener- enjoy greater flexibility in the types of
they are better informed and better ates the chart that best represents queries they make, and they can
equipped to make sound, timely deci- the information. For example, when access full historical data.
sions. Ultimately, the solution enables displaying percentage breakdowns of
higher-performing organizations. a multiple entry data set, the software This functionality provides a significant
knows to generate a pie chart; when advantage over traditional data ware-
comparing multiple members like reve- housing, in which maintenance-intensive
nue and profit, it displays a bar chart. aggregations forced IT developers to be
Your information workers benefit from selective about the BI functionality and

3. data sets they made available. In those performance tuning – a significant BI solutions, which are designed to be
instances, only mission-critical data and benefit, considering that up to 20% of quick to deploy and easy to activate.
applications could be deployed to a IT efforts in traditional BI projects are You simply plug the combined appli-
select few, leaving many workers allocated to building and maintaining ance into your existing instances of
deprived of meaningful insight and the aggregates needed to cope with SAP NetWeaver® Business Warehouse
widespread information access. expanding data volumes and growing (SAP NetWeaver BW) component,
user population. deploy your SAP BusinessObjects BI
SAP BusinessObjects Explorer solution, and determine which informa-
Helps IT Achieve Success Data modeling is crafted to be much tion spaces you wish to supercharge
simpler with SAP BusinessObjects and expose to business users.
In an ideal world, your IT team supports Explorer. With more details managed in
change rather than acting as a bottle- information cubes, you achieve faster Deploy Proven, Reliable Infrastructure
neck. It delivers intuitive, fast, self-ser- deployment and reduce the need for There are more than 500 instances of
vice information access to everyone in remodeling. In addition, the software SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator soft-
the organization. But traditionally the can reduce load times by as much as ware, making SAP BusinessObjects
cost of adding additional users and 80%. Tests have shown loading at Explorer a proven and well-established
supporting more data is linearly incre- rates in excess of 1 terabyte per hour. solution. This means that business
mental. SAP BusinessObjects Explorer users across all industry segments –
helps you reduce operational overhead, React Quickly to Business including retail, consumer products,
preserve capital investment, and mini- with Faster Delivery telecommunications, utilities, manufac-
mize implementation costs. Your IT Traditional BI solutions required a hard- turing, and public sector – can explore
team gains a way to rapidly deploy and ware vendor, a BI software vendor, and millions of rows of data with confidence
flexibly administer BI applications, while a specialized consulting partner to in high performance and scalability.
enabling broad self-service information implement the BI solution – and then With SAP BusinessObjects Explorer,
access to everyone in the organization. tune performance. Thanks to quick your business users can access the
And the solution permits linear scaling appliance setup and configuration, information they need, when they need
to accommodate more users, data, and zero aggregate modeling, and simple it.
BI tools, so you can add new groups of activation, your SAP BusinessObjects
users at relatively low costs. Explorer solution shortens time to Find Out More
delivery and heightens agility for IT.
Manage and Scale Your Applications Equipped with a rapidly deployable To learn more about SAP
More Easily and Efficiently hardware/software appliance, the solu- BusinessObjects Explorer and
Designed to be easy and efficient to tion is preinstalled by SAP technology what it can do for your company, visit
manage, the software accommodates partners. Requiring minimal configura- www.sap.com/solutions/
expanding volumes of data and users. tion, there is no need to pre-aggregate sapbusinessobjects/index.epx.
IT no longer needs to perform data for storage in information cubes;
mundane, low value-added tasks to aggregation occurs when users exe-
optimize the system. In-memory cute queries. The solution includes
indexing reduces the need for world-class SAP BusinessObjects

4. QUIck FAcTS www.sap.com /contactsap
Summary
The SAP® BusinessObjects™ Explorer solution combines intuitive information search and
exploration functionality with high performance and scalability.
Business Challenges
• Improve end-user adoption of BI tools to enable fact-based decisions
• Improve query performance and response times to increase productivity and enhance
decision making
• Contend with spiraling IT costs and changing business priorities
Key Features
• Search across all data sources – Simply enter a few search keywords to find the most
relevant information instantly from across all data sources
• Contextual exploration – Gain additional contextually relevant details when searching - no
data model or data knowledge required
• Automated relevancy and chart generation – Work with a solution that presents the
most relevant keyword search results first and automatically generates the chart that best
represents the information
• High performance and scalability – Take advantage of the high performance and
scalability you need for immediate answers across very large data sets
Business Benefits
• Enables higher performing organizations, thanks to pervasive BI and fact-based
timely decisions
• Allows IT to become a proactive business partner supporting and even driving busi-
ness changes, thanks to shorter time to delivery and heightened agility
For More Information
To learn more about SAP BusinessObjects business intelligence solutions,
visit our Web site at www.sap.com/sapbusinessobjects.
50 094 877 (09/04)
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