SAP Reports Significant Market Share Gain in Business Intelligence

In a series of news releases1 underscoring the business value it is delivering with the SAP NetWeaver® platform, SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced that it has significantly increased its business intelligence (BI) market share lead over suite vendors and is well-positioned to surpass even pure-play BI vendors. Rapidly gaining momentum among customers worldwide, SAP NetWeaver® Business Intelligence delivers an enhanced user experience, integrated planning capabilities and seamless integration of SAP with non-SAP data. Customers from key industries including consumer products, manufacturing, oil and gas, financial services, public services and life sciences—such as Brown-Forman, BP, Bundeswehr (German Armed Forces), Deutsche Bank, Kimberly-Clark, MassMutual Financial Group, Novartis and Synthes—are gaining measurable business value from SAP NetWeaver BI. Additionally, customers are reaping the benefits of SAP’s innovations in embedded “in-memory” technology with SAP NetWeaver® BI Accelerator, a “snap-in” appliance that works with SAP NetWeaver BI to increase the speed of analyzing critical business information up to 200-times faster than alternative tools.

As data volumes skyrocket, the costs of administering databases soar and data access becomes ever more critical for information workers. Taking an innovative approach to these BI challenges, SAP embeds analytics within the relevant business processes, uniquely enabling information workers to take action at the time and place needed. SAP’s thought leadership around information management has rapidly translated into market leadership in the areas of BI and analytics.

SAP NetWeaver BI Accelerator Offers Unprecedented Speed and Performance
SAP NetWeaver BI Accelerator delivers unprecedented speed and performance in a “snap-in” appliance, scanning billions of transaction records in seconds and enabling a new breed of highly flexible and process-embedded analytics applications—combining transactional and analytical capabilities into a single process. Developed in collaboration with Intel, SAP NetWeaver BI Accelerator allows organizations to sort through an increasing volume of information quickly while maintaining high performance levels and keeping costs down. Shipped as an appliance pre-installed on 64-bit Intel® Xeon® processor-based blade servers from HP or IBM, SAP NetWeaver BI Accelerator is delivering significant benefits for customers worldwide.

Embedded Innovation: In-Memory Technology
SAP is a first mover in the market shift away from database-driven business intelligence toward innovative technologies that significantly lower costs for customers. In-memory processing, smart compression and search engine-based parallel processing are some of the key technical advancements behind SAP NetWeaver BI Accelerator that enable increased speed and flexibility. As opposed to traditional disk aggregation techniques, in-memory technology loads detailed data into memory for reporting and analysis, providing users with increased response time and flexibility.

In an October 2006 Gartner report titled, “BI Applications Benefit from In-Memory Technology Improvements,” Gartner analysts Kurt Schlegel, Mark A. Beyer, Andreas Bitterer, and Bill Hostmann noted that BI platform and database vendors using traditional aggregation techniques will be forced to embrace in-memory technology to stay competitive. Specifically, Gartner predicts that by 2012, seventy percent of Global 1000 organizations will “load detailed data into memory as the primary method to optimize BI application performance.”

SAP Grows Share in Emerging BI Market
In September 2006, Gartner issued a report titled, “Market Share Business Intelligence Platforms, Worldwide, 2005,” measuring market growth in 2005. Authored by Dan Sommer and Colleen Graham, Gartner found that the overall BI platform market grew by 15.5 percent to almost $4 billion (license revenue), and expects the market to grow to $6.3 billion in 2010. Gartner found that “embedded BI”—which includes vendors that deliver BI solutions within a larger set of offerings—grew the fastest at 53.5 percent. SAP grew market share 130.9 percent, according to the report.

“SAP is delivering on its business intelligence strategy, as evidenced by our significant market share growth, our advances in BI technology and rapid customer adoption,” said Nimish Mehta, senior vice president, Enterprise Information Management, SAP. “Now with SAP NetWeaver BI Accelerator, SAP has supercharged business intelligence and has resolved the classic challenge of trading performance for speed. Companies can now reach new levels of accuracy and response times when analyzing large amounts of critical business information across multiple systems.”

Customers from Key Industries Gain Business Value from SAP NetWeaver BI
Customers are leveraging SAP NetWeaver BI to seamlessly integrate business information across their organizations, improve transparency across their businesses, speed decision making and better target their specific markets, including consumer products, manufacturing, life sciences, financial services and many others.

“Since we made the strategic decision to use SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence, we have continued to see SAP deliver new innovations that enhance the user experience, increase the robustness of front-end reporting tools and improve the response times for ad-hoc analysis against large and complex data sources,” said Marc Baldwin, manager of business intelligence, Brown-Forman Corporation. “With the latest version of SAP NetWeaver, the visual composer tool provides a simplified user experience, while the BI Accelerator delivers lightning-fast response times on the largest BI queries.”

“SAP is a key partner of ours, helping us to realize our enterprise information management goals,” said Robert Casale, vice president, Enterprise Services Group, MassMutual Financial Group. “SAP NetWeaver BI is rapidly becoming a cornerstone of our information strategy, enabling us to more effectively integrate and leverage SAP and non-SAP data throughout our various businesses. This capability represents a significant advancement for our business in terms of our information management capabilities and for our architecture in terms of a simplified, adaptable platform. We are confident that SAP innovations such as the SAP NetWeaver BI Accelerator, which we are planning to deploy in 2007, will enable even greater possibilities for us to further advance our goals.”

“We are consolidating information from our six regional SAP Business Information Warehouse systems into one global reporting and analytics infrastructure based on SAP NetWeaver,” said Olivier Debluts, project leader of BI Solutions, Novartis. “With more than 1,000 users performing ad hoc reporting and analysis on that consolidated global system, it would be very difficult to optimize the system with traditional means. We simply don’t know what the user community is going to do. That is why we are relying on the SAP NetWeaver BI Accelerator, for very efficient and flexible ad hoc analysis. We are planning to go live with the SAP NetWeaver BI Accelerator in January 2007.”

“At Synthes, we are managing hundreds of BI query executions per day, drawing upon 300 gigabytes of data made up equally of SAP and non-SAP data,” said Cor de Ruiter, head of business information systems and application development, Synthes. “With the SAP NetWeaver BI Accelerator, we are seeing tremendous response times that deliver valuable business insight in sales operations analysis and planning. With this, we would expect the BI Accelerator to become a key asset in most SAP NetWeaver installations.”

For more information on SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence, please visit:
http://www.sap.com/platform/netweaver/components/bi/index.epx

For more information on SAP NetWeaver BI Accelerator, please visit: http://www.sapintelalliance.com

To read Gartner’s entire report on in-memory technology, please visit: http://www.sap.com/platform/netweaver/pdf/BI_Applications_Gartner.pdf


1 SAP Drives Innovation and Market Leadership with SAP NetWeaverCompanies increasingly realize that they need to manage and leverage business information as a strategic asset, to control costs, increase competitiveness and accelerate innovation. Moving beyond traditional database-driven information mining, SAP’s innovation and thought leadership in the business process-driven management and delivery of information has rapidly translated into market leadership in the areas of analytics, business intelligence and master data management. (See related press releases: “SAP Leads Product Information Management Market Worldwide” and “Independent Research Firm Names SAP Revenue Leader for Analytic Applications”)