This white paper discusses the challenges of managing large and complex business intelligence (BI) deployments. As BI adoption increases, deployments are growing larger in scale and more complex due to diverse user needs. This puts pressure on organizations to efficiently manage their BI platforms. The APOS Solutions enhance and extend the capabilities of the SAP BusinessObjects platform to help customers more efficiently operate, monitor, and administer their BI environments. Key benefits include reduced maintenance costs through automation, improved crisis management through enhanced monitoring and control, and increased end user productivity.
3. Driving Efficient Management of the BI Platform
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Executive Summary ................................................................................................................................ 4
Introduction ............................................................................................................................................ 5
Challenges of BI Adoption and Utilization ............................................................................................ 5
Size of BI Deployments........................................................................................................................................................ 5
Complexity of BI Deployments .......................................................................................................................................... 6
Impact of BI Deployments .................................................................................................................................................. 6
Expectations of BI Deployments........................................................................................................................................ 6
APOS Solutions for Growing BI Challenges .......................................................................................... 7
Enhancing the Platform........................................................................................................................................................ 7
Extending the Platform......................................................................................................................................................... 7
Impact of APOS Solutions ...................................................................................................................... 8
Operational Maintenance Efficiencies................................................................................................................................ 8
Crisis Management................................................................................................................................................................. 9
Migrations ............................................................................................................................................................................. 10
End-User Productivity ........................................................................................................................................................ 10
Summary ................................................................................................................................................12
Customer Implementations ...................................................................................................................13
The Partnerships ....................................................................................................................................13
APOS Systems Inc............................................................................................................................................................... 13
SAP BusinessObjects .......................................................................................................................................................... 13
[3]
4. Driving Efficient Management of the BI Platform
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Helping over 750 SAP BusinessObjects customers globally, APOS Solutions enhance and
extend the SAP BusinessObjects software platform. By enabling deeper control over system
monitoring, administration, deployment and integration, APOS Solutions yield lower TCO
and higher ROI for SAP BusinessObjects deployments. APOS delivers solutions for
advanced system management (APOS Administrator), system monitoring and auditing
(APOS Insight), report and object back-up/archive/restore (APOS Storage Center), report
bursting and distribution (APOS Publisher), integration with Microsoft Outlook, and
integration with ESRI GIS mapping solutions. APOS has been awarded the SAP
BusinessObjects ‘Technology Partner of the Year’ award for 2006, 2007, and 2008.
The focus of this white paper is to clarify key value drivers and points of impact which the
APOS Solutions bring to SAP BusinessObjects deployments. This document is divided into
three main sections:
1) Challenges of BI Adoption and Utilization
The initial focus of this document is to outline key trends impacting the execution and
management of BI deployments, and related challenges that have arrived due to those
forces. These trends and challenges are discussed in the context of Size of BI Deployments,
Complexity of BI Deployments, Impact of BI Deployments, and Expectations of BI
Deployments.
2) APOS Solutions for Growing BI Challenges
The second section of this white paper looks at key conceptual themes of how the APOS
Solutions bring value to the SAP BusinessObjects platform, and distinguishes value points in
the context of both a) enhancing the platform, and b) extending the platform.
3) Impact of APOS Solutions
The final section of the document looks at the specific elements of where APOS Solutions
are impacting and reducing the TCO of SAP BusinessObjects deployments. Primary areas
discussed are:
Operational maintenance efficiencies
Crisis management
Migration efficiencies
End-user productivity
Reduced infrastructure
Reduced IT opportunity costs
Reduced IT staff turnover
Compliance initiatives
[4]
5. Driving Efficient Management of the BI Platform
INTRODUCTION
A recent global survey of over 1,500 CIOs resulted in a respondent ranking of business
intelligence (BI) as their top technology priority. In many respects this is not a surprising
revelation, given the positive impact that business intelligence solutions have been
delivering, but it does reveal how far these technologies have come in their acceptance and
deployment levels over the past decade. For many organizations, ‘BI’ was very much an
unknown acronym just a few short years ago, while today these same organizations are now
relying on BI technologies for the provision of information that drives strategic and
operational decisions at all levels. Business Intelligence is now an ‘enterprise’ platform
technology for an important percentage of organizations. As with all such technology
platforms, significant levels of resources are applied behind the scenes in the execution and
management of these environments.
CHALLENGES OF BI ADOPTION AND UTILIZATION
The increased adoption and utilization of BI has resulted in better informed decision
making, which is in turn driving more efficient and effective organizations, but these
benefits are accompanied by heavy responsibilities and challenges. Deployment size,
complexity, impact and expectation are critical factors behind these responsibilities and
challenges, and we can view these factors in the context of the related supply-side and
demand-side drivers.
SIZE OF BI DEPLOYMENTS
Demand: Dramatically more users, departments, divisions, customers, suppliers,
stakeholders are signing on to utilize decision making content supplied via business
intelligence deployments. While BI usage level profiles range significantly from heavy users,
to moderate users, to light users, the cumulative effect of all these user groups is weighty and
broad in scope. Even with significant increases in both the volume of users and the volume
of content during the past few years, all signs suggest that most organizations are still in the
relatively early stages of BI platform utilization.
Supply: The underlying infrastructure, security, and content management requirements
grow proportionally with the user and content demands. Larger, more powerful server
environments are required to meet these demands. There are more BI user accounts, group
accounts, report objects, report instances, servers, services, etc. to manage and interact with
— this causes a proportional growth in the human resources required to care for and feed
these growing demands. This growth in human resource requirement is not limited to the
direct administrators of the BI system, but also to those teams which are responsible for
supporting database, network, security, web and application-layer deployments which are all
dependencies to making the business intelligence system successful.
[5]
6. Driving Efficient Management of the BI Platform
COMPLEXITY OF BI DEPLOYMENTS
Demand: As user volume and project/departmental volume increases, there is a significant
increase in the unique requirements that come from the various users, groups departments
and projects. Many organizations are moving towards the consolidation of multiple
departmental deployments of BI systems into a single ‘shared services’ environment, where a
single business intelligence deployment serves the diverse BI needs of a broad range of
departments and projects within their organization.
Supply: The result of this trend is a multiplier effect on system management efforts due to
complexity factors that result, such as distinct processing schedules, system objects, and
security needs, metered system usage, and intricate data, application and platform integration
needs. All of these complexities are driven by the diverse end user community. In order to
manage the pressures resulting from these additional complexities, further human resources
must be directed to accommodate and care for this environment and its related platforms
and technologies.
IMPACT OF BI DEPLOYMENTS
Demand: BI is driving better decision making at all levels and in more departments of
organizations. This valuable benefit is accompanied with the significant responsibility of
fulfilling the information needs for these operational and strategic decision-making
scenarios, and the direct link to the financial impact of these decisions. Whether it is a team
of front line service employees making daily operational decisions, a hallmark customer
accessing sensitive account statements, or senior management making critical strategic
planning decisions, the information supplied through BI platforms has a dramatic and
growing financial impact.
Supply: Quite simply, the stakes of a successful BI platform are getting much higher, and
those with responsibility for managing and maintaining this environment recognize this and
feel the mounting pressure of this responsibility. These pressures are driving CIOs and
managers to compensate by applying additional human, system and IT resources in order to
successfully fulfill their mandate. Their approach becomes focused on making sound
decisions on the most efficient resources to apply, as well as utilizing strategies and
technologies to minimize risks.
EXPECTATIONS OF BI DEPLOYMENTS
Demand: With the increased pressure on BI due to its growing financial impact, clearly it
becomes critical that information must be available to decision makers when and where they
need it. The timing of business decisions does have segments of predictable needs such as
month, quarter and year-end reporting; however, BI systems are feeding information
stretching far beyond those traditional operational and financial reporting cycles. It is now
becoming critical that BI systems are ready and accessible to meet user needs at any time,
and tolerance of the end user community for the BI system being ‘offline’ is declining
rapidly.
Supply: Ongoing, continual and rapid accessibility to information is quickly becoming the
expectation of BI end users, and the satisfaction criteria that BI system owners are measured
against. Losing the trust and engagement of the end user community is very difficult to
recover from, and critical to avoid. For many IT organizations, service level agreements for
BI deployments are becoming common place, and often have financial penalties related to
underperformance. However, for those organizations that do not have formal SLA
agreements in place, the unwritten expectations of the BI constituents are equally
motivating. Where those constituents are end customers of the organization, that
[6]
7. Driving Efficient Management of the BI Platform
motivation is even further amplified. As with the financial impact factors noted above, the
heightened expectations of BI users drive CIOs and managers to compensate by applying
additional resources to mitigate risks. In many cases this means additional human resources,
but for matters such as rapid response and recovery to system emergencies this more
commonly requires that enhanced technology resources be applied.
In summary, the demand-side drivers of size, complexity, impact and expectation are clearly
propelling supply-side requirements for human, system, and technology resources to be
applied to the BI infrastructure. However, like most areas of business operations, BI
resources are under constraint and must be managed efficiently, and the Total Cost of
Ownership (TCO) of the BI deployment must be optimized. SAP BusinessObjects
Software deployment managers, specifically, are under these same pressures to optimize the
TCO of their deployment.
APOS SOLUTIONS FOR GROWING BI CHALLENGES
Like many other successful technology vendors, SAP has a vibrant partner ecosystem, and
third party solutions have been created around the core SAP BusinessObjects platform to
build on TCO optimization. This is exactly the mandate which APOS Solutions have been
delivering on since 1998. By focusing on 1) enhancing the core SAP BusinessObjects
platform and 2) extending that platform, APOS Solutions deliver value through power
administration and management, platform monitoring, system auditing, report publishing,
and content archiving.
ENHANCING THE PLATFORM
In many cases, APOS Solutions build on the inherent administration and management
capabilities of the SAP BusinessObjects platform, dramatically enhancing functionality and
control. Key concepts for APOS Solutions are providing functionality and automation that
enables streamlined system administrator resources to manage and control high volumes of
BI-related system settings, services, users, groups, objects, schedules, and security. Not only
is volume of control a significant theme, but depth of granular control of the BI system is
also a key benefit. As well, there are important reliability gains due to reductions in human
errors resulting from automating repeatable tasks which are otherwise prone to errors and
mistakes. The automation, volume of throughput and depth of control provided by APOS
Solutions enable valuable IT resources to manage the environment dramatically faster,
helping to achieve the response times for ongoing maintenance and emergency resolution
that is being driven by rising user expectations.
EXTENDING THE PLATFORM
In addition to enhancing existing platform capabilities, APOS Solutions also bring various
facilities and feature sets that are not offered in any manner within the core platform. These
platform extensions bring added competencies to the administration, management and
monitoring of the SAP BusinessObjects deployment, and also provide added capabilities
within the solutions that are deployed to end users. A more efficiently managed platform
with extended insight, control and performance all yield greater satisfaction and productivity
in the end user community.
[7]
8. Driving Efficient Management of the BI Platform
IMPACT OF APOS SOLUTIONS
When customers review the impact that APOS Solutions have on their SAP
BusinessObjects deployment, there are several factors to be considered. Key factors that
can be measured for financial impact include operational maintenance efficiencies, crisis
management, migration influence and end-user productivity influence.
OPERATIONAL MAINTENANCE EFFICIENCIES
The ongoing care and feeding of an SAP BusinessObjects deployment requires commitment
of various resources. Human resources are a very significant portion of that equation, and
APOS Solutions allow system administrators to be much more efficient and effective in
their tasks, enabling platform owners to be more efficient in how they allocate and manage
their valuable IT human resources. The efficiency and effectiveness of IT human resources
is derived from APOS Solutions in the areas of regular maintenance, system reliability, and
system optimization.
Regular Maintenance:
As noted earlier, APOS Solutions enable faster, deeper, higher volume control over the SAP
BusinessObjects environment and administration tasks. Quite simply, APOS Solutions
allow system administrators to address their ongoing, regular maintenance activities in
dramatically less time, compared to using the administration capabilities provided with the
core SAP BusinessObjects solution. Some examples of areas where dramatic system
maintenance time savings can be realized are:
scheduling and rescheduling
report instance management
system object management and maintenance
report object setting maintenance
report object management, maintenance and promotion
universe management, maintenance, and promotion
user and user group security maintenance
automated report instance archiving
data source maintenance
automated platform service monitoring
For these examples and for many other regular maintenance tasks, reductions in operator
time requirements yield direct cost savings and a resulting reduction of TCO of the
platform.
System Reliability:
During the course of regular maintenance tasks, system administrators are engaged in
various tasks which require their manual translation, input, and execution. In many cases
these are manual tasks that are better served via automation to reduce or eliminate the
unnecessary operator time consumed in the preparation, input and execution steps.
However, an additional challenge exists in the form of the significant and unnecessary
operator time consumed in recovering from human errors, which are a certainty to occur
during these detailed manual processes. While matters of end-user productivity are certainly
impacted by system reliability, the focus of this section is on system administrator time
[8]
9. Driving Efficient Management of the BI Platform
savings. APOS Solutions provide unique methodologies and automation that directly
reduces the time required for troubleshooting and recovery from improperly executed
maintenance tasks.
System Optimization:
As noted above, there are various pressures around maximizing content throughput,
minimizing infrastructure resources, and optimizing processing cycles. These pressures
drive system administrators to spend significant effort in developing and executing steps and
methods for tracking information related to system users, usage patterns, performance,
security, available content and capacity planning, all in an effort to better understand the
status of their system and take steps to optimize. In many cases, these information
gathering steps are very time consuming to follow, and for many scenarios the information
that is inherently available lacks the quality and depth desired for optimized decision making.
APOS Solutions provide unique facilities, methods and automation which deliver both the
quality and depth of system information desired, as well as significantly reducing the level of
operator time involved in doing so. The result is proper insight into the system to assess
health status, bottlenecks and resource opportunities; this enables the administration team to
predict and resolve problems in advance of manifestation, and take action on balancing and
optimizing system resources.
CRISIS MANAGEMENT
During the course of any year, most SAP BusinessObjects deployments will experience a
number of unplanned interruptions. These unplanned interruptions can range from a
moderate disruption in functioning due to the failure of one or more system services, to a
full-scale and extended failure of the platform due to collapse of a physical server. While
many other unplanned interruptions can transpire, the fact is that these scenarios will
certainly occur for most deployments, with considerable costs incurred as a result of these
events. The costs most commonly incurred are human resource costs due to administrator
overtime, external consultant assistance and the cost of supporting staff from other areas
within IT — DBA, network, security, infrastructure, web, applications and project
management personnel may be impacted by and called upon in such events. Another area
of significant potential cost due to unplanned interruptions is that of charges resulting from
Service Level Agreements with pre-determined costs that will be charged to IT by business
units due to system underperformance or lack of availability of the system. Also, due to the
interconnection of system and network infrastructure resources between application groups,
restoration activities related to an unplanned interruption of the BI platform could very
easily cause an unplanned interruption for another application group. Clearly there are
significant costs that result in these scenarios.
APOS Solutions have a dramatic impact on reducing these costs, and do so by reducing
both the number of unplanned interruptions and the time involved in recovering from these
events. APOS Solutions can reduce the number of crisis events by closely monitoring BI
system services and overall system health metrics, keeping the administrator team informed
on the status of these metrics, and providing alert notification of threshold conditions where
system metrics exceed pre-defined tolerance levels. In addition to alerting, APOS Solutions
can take automated corrective action in an attempt to resolve certain threat events before
they manifest themselves — an aid towards a goal of a self-monitoring and self-healing BI
system. As well, when unplanned interruptions occur, APOS Solutions dramatically improve
the response and recovery time involved in restoring and rebuilding the system. Those
improved response and recovery times have a direct impact on reducing the costs related to
crisis event management.
[9]
10. Driving Efficient Management of the BI Platform
MIGRATIONS
Like all major technology platforms, SAP BusinessObjects deployments are faced with the
time consuming and risk intensive necessity of version and platform migrations. The
frequency of these migrations varies between organizations, depending on their IT and
business requirements as well as the organizational IT culture regarding pace of technology
adoption. Whatever the frequency, organizations of all sizes recognize that the cost and
productivity impact of an SAP BusinessObjects system migration can have a substantial
impact on their annual budget spending. The larger and more complex the deployment, the
longer and more complex the migration process, and the larger the budget required to
complete the process. APOS Solutions can assist with some of the very time consuming
elements of a migration process, and as a result have a direct positive impact on the cost of
migration. Some examples of specific areas where APOS Solutions can provide important
efficiencies include:
auditing of the migration, verification of successful migration of objects,
instances and security settings
bulk operation of security settings and modifications to security and preference
settings in the target environment
bulk changes to objects and schedules in order to utilize new features and
settings or respond to in bulk to configuration changes needed due to new
features and settings-monitoring and metrics gathering for system optimization
of the target migration environment
migration and rebuilding of recurring schedules
optimize source system by archiving content to streamline content to be
migrated
For migration tasks such as these, the methodologies and automation provided by APOS
Solutions can reduce the time involved by 50%-90%, as compared to using inherent
platform capabilities. Some examples of such migration tasks would be scheduling, instance
search, user preferences initialization, bulk changes to object and schedule settings, bulk
database password change for objects and their schedules, etc. Given that many large
deployments require months of planning and execution surrounding such processes, it is
easy to recognize the financial benefits involved. In addition to providing more efficient
capabilities, APOS Solutions can also provide otherwise unavailable insight into system
content, patterns and performance which result a faster, smoother migration process.
END-USER PRODUCTIVITY
Platform availability, content availability, content reliability, and system performance are all
factors that have been noted above. In previous sections, discussion of these concepts has
focused on how APOS Solutions bring efficiencies for accomplishing tasks and processes
for managing these factors. However, what have not been discussed thus far are the
dramatic cumulative gains that result for end users of the SAP BusinessObjects system when
APOS Solutions have been utilized to enhance the stability, performance, and reliability of
the BI platform and content. When the system is stable and performing well, BI content is
available and ready when needed for decision making. This impacts end users by reducing
or eliminating inefficient work cycles due to waiting for information or the necessity for
workarounds due to information not being available or reliable.
Combined with this is the potentially staggering impact of both direct and opportunity costs
of resulting from delayed or bad decision making, due to information not being available or
not being reliable. In some cases the costs associated with an unavailable or unreliable BI
[ 10 ]
11. Driving Efficient Management of the BI Platform
platform will be related to a single decision error or single project that has a major financial
cost impact, but more predictable is the dramatic cumulative effect of many small
inefficiencies of end user time waste, or many small to medium sized decisions that are
impacted by an unavailable or unreliable BI platform. In assessing the impact, it is very
reasonable to consider a small percentage of productivity improvement across the full BI
end user community, while more challenging is trying to predict what the larger impact
events might be.
In most deployments there are a broad range of usage levels within the user community, but
it is reasonable to categorize the user base into heavy users, moderate users, and light users.
Certainly the heavy user group will have the greatest end-user productivity gains, given that
an efficient, available and reliable system will produce significant time savings for this
segment of users due to their high reliance and usage of the BI system. As well, this is also a
group of people who are typically involved in decision support for the larger impact
decisions within the organization. However, even minor productivity gains in the light user
community will have significant cumulative financial impact due to the much larger number
of users that are likely to exist in the light user community.
Looking beyond the Light, Moderate and Heavy users within an organization, we must also
consider the impact of availability and reliability on the external users of the systems. Many
organizations today are utilizing their SAP BusinessObjects platform to deliver high value
information to their customers via an extranet or customer-facing portal. This is a
significant benefit to the customer and has an important impact on solidifying the business
relationship. However if the information portal availability or the reliability of the content
being delivered becomes a point of frustration to the customer due to availability or
reliability, then the portal instead has a detrimental impact on the customer relationship.
Operational maintenance efficiency, crisis management, migration, and end user productivity
are all key factors in assessing the financial impact that APOS Solutions can have on an SAP
BusinessObjects deployment. However, these are not the only factors for consideration, as
several other important factors do exist.
Reduced Infrastructure:
A well tuned and optimized BI system means that the underlying infrastructure can be kept
to a minimum size. Containing physical server resource requirements means that hardware
and licensing costs are contained, and the number of potential failure-points is reduced.
APOS Solutions bring insight and functionality to SAP BusinessObjects deployments that
are important to this tuning and optimization.
Reduced IT Opportunity Costs:
While potential IT projects and their related benefits are almost unlimited, IT human
resources are typically quite limited and are often a key factor for potential IT projects not
being carried forward. APOS Solutions bring efficiencies to SAP BusinessObjects
deployments that reduce the time requirements of IT human resources, thereby opening up
time for those same resources to go on and pursue other projects that drive value within the
organization.
Reduced IT Turnover:
Many of the regular and ongoing administration and maintenance tasks involved with an
SAP BusinessObjects deployment can be tedious, repetitive and cumbersome in nature.
Such tasks can have a negative impact on the longevity of a platform administrator. APOS
Solutions reduce such frustrations and increase employment satisfaction for administrators
by providing capabilities which allow them to take rapid, bulk, direct, and granular actions
on the SAP BusinessObjects environment, freeing their time for more inspiring and higher
value activities.
[ 11 ]
12. Driving Efficient Management of the BI Platform
Compliance Initiatives:
APOS Solutions provide platform capabilities which can be utilized strategically to assist
with various compliance initiatives. One example of compliance related utilization might
involve the provision of a controlled report and document archival process which meets
challenging compliance standards. Another such example may be the provision of enhanced
promotion controls which enables appropriate restrictions on how administrators can access
or change the content and security settings within development, test, QA, and production
environments.
SUMMARY
Business Intelligence solutions play a critical role in the operations and strategic planning for
today’s organizations, and it is clear that the impact of these solutions are still in the early
stages. As these environments continue to grow in their size and complexity, SAP
BusinessObjects system administrators will benefit from utilizing APOS Solutions in order
to produce a deployment that satisfies the expectations of their end user base as they utilize
this information to positively impact the results of their organizations.
[ 12 ]
13. Driving Efficient Management of the BI Platform
CUSTOMER IMPLEMENTATIONS
Examples of customer implementations are available in the Case Studies section of
www.apos.com:
http://www.apos.com/Company/CaseStudies.aspx
THE PARTNERSHIPS
APOS SYSTEMS INC.
APOS is an authorized SAP Software Partner and was recognized as the SAP
BusinessObjects ‘Technology Partner of the Year’ for 2006, 2007, and 2008. A leading SAP
BusinessObjects Partner, APOS Systems Inc. offers incomparable knowledge and expertise
in extending the SAP BusinessObjects XI platform. APOS Solutions are helping over 750
SAP BusinessObjects customers, in over 30 countries worldwide, maximize their investment
in the SAP BusinessObjects XI platform.
APOS Solutions for SAP BusinessObjects XI provide customers with powerful tools to
extend their business intelligence system. The APOS Solutions are efficiency-enabling
technologies which bring enhanced management, monitoring, and integration to SAP
BusinessObjects deployments. The net result for the business intelligence system is
increased control and scalability, and decreased total cost of ownership. As well, APOS
development services often use APOS Solutions as the foundation to fast-track custom
development projects.
APOS Solutions include telephone, email, and web-based technical support plus a
maintenance program that provides new versions going forward to support new releases or
upgrades of SAP BusinessObjects XI.
SAP BUSINESSOBJECTS
SAP is the world's leading provider of business software, offering applications and services
that enable companies of all sizes and in more than 25 industries to become best-run
businesses. With more than 82,000 customers in over 120 countries, the company is listed
on several exchanges, including the Frankfurt stock exchange and NYSE, under the symbol
"SAP."
The SAP® BusinessObjects™ portfolio transforms the way the world works by connecting
people, information and businesses. With open, heterogeneous solutions in the areas of
business intelligence; information management; governance, risk and compliance; and
enterprise performance management, the SAP BusinessObjects portfolio enables
organizations to close the gap between business strategy and execution.
For more information, visit www.sap.com.
[ 13 ]
14. Driving Efficient Management of the BI Platform
HEAD OFFICE
100 Conestoga College Blvd., Suite 1118
Kitchener, ON
Canada N3H 1J2
Phone 519.894.APOS (2767)
Fax 519.894.1891
BRANCH OFFICES
35447 McKee Road
Abbotsford, BC
Canada V3G 2Z4
Phone 604.864.0766
Fax 604.864.4291
80-83 Long Lane
London, UK EC1A 9ET
EMEA Sales: 44 (0) 207 099 0374
EMEA Support: 44 (0) 208 819 9640 Ext 1
EMAIL:
apos@apos.com
WEB:
http://www.apos.com/
[ 14 ]