APOS: Providing the Missing Piece

When I was growing up I always enjoyed putting puzzles together. I loved the challenge of putting all those pieces together so that I could see the whole picture. Sometimes I would borrow a puzzle from a friend and as I was close to finishing the puzzle, I would discover 1 or 2 puzzle pieces were missing. The puzzle was incomplete.

From a BI perspective, APOS has been a long partner of BusinessObjects. My first opportunity to work with APOS came while I was working at Crystal Decisions. Our next generation Crystal Enterprise product was new and although it provided a great framework for the future, there were a few pieces missing from our complete BI picture. Thankfully, APOS developed a number of powerful solutions to fill those gaps so that our customers didn’t have to wait until tomorrow’s release for the functionality they needed today.

Do you feel you are missing a piece from BusinessObjects XI 3.0?

Business Objects has many great partners, but probably non-better than APOS. In January of this year, APOS was awarded the Business Objects Technology Partner of the Year Award for 2007. They have used the BusinessObjects SDK more extensively than any other BusinessObjects partner. They don’t just one solution. Their tools provide dozens of potential missing pieces that might fit your BI puzzle.

My Favorite APOS Tools

So what’s so great about APOS? Well, here are my top 3 list favorite solutions:

1. InfoScheduler – mass scheduling – dead simple. Scheduling has always been one of those areas were BusinessObjects added a few new features with ever release. Unfortunately however it’s not an area that tends to get a lot of attention. It was only in XI 3.0 that we introduced native bursting within the platform. InfoScheduler provides an Excel-based report scheduling tool that allows mass scheduling of reports from an Excel spreadsheet. How easy is that? Can you say zero training? Users can copy paste, import, export data into Excel to provide scheduling for 10, 100 or 1,000s of reports.
2. Object Manager – Although the CMC is a comprehensive administration console, administrators of large reporting environment often struggle with managing this volume of information. In XI 3.0, BusinessObjects introduced a number of new enhancements which made working with multiple objects much easier; however Object Manager takes it to the next level. You can manage users, groups, reports, security and even the report life cycle process. Object Manager provides power, ease-of-use and flexibility.
3. KPI – One of the most common requests I hear from customers is the ability to do reporting off their CMS. BusinessObjects XI provides an auditing database to allow customers to report off of user activity, but how do administrators report off the objects within the CMS? With KPI, APOS allows you to extract all the XML metadata that is stored within the CMS to an external relational database. Now you can create reports that allow you to:

• Analyze Business View and Universe configuration information
• Examine Crystal and Desktop Intelligence report structure
• See How many reports use the database field profit
• Show CMS Statistics
• Discover how many reports are scheduled to run tomorrow.

You can even set an automatic schedule to refresh the external metadata database on a regular basis. It’s your own mini-datamart for reporting off your BI system. You have to see it to believe it.

Southwest is using all three of these tools and several more!

Can’t Find Your Missing Piece?

If you’ve look through the APOS website and you can’t find the type of functionality that you feel is missing from BusinessObjects, call APOS anyway. Necessity is the mother of invention. Each of the solutions that APOS provides today was developed from the real-world needs of customers just like you. APOS would love to talk to you about extending BusinessObjects in a way that they may not have thought of.

Puzzle Complete

As a kid I was rarely able to find the missing puzzle piece, but in the area of extending BusinessObjects, APOS continues to deliver. Their depth of experience means they understand how BusinessObjects works today and how to make it work better for you tomorrow.

Teleran – Your Database Nanny!

Okay – so the auditing and query management that comes with SAP BusinessObjects doesn’t do it for you? Need more umph? Do you want more real-time information about your BusinessObjects system? Are you experiencing query and database performance problems? Need to identify long running queries and kill them?

Every once and a while you hear about a partner technology that makes you say, Wow! And that is what I said when I saw a demonstration of the solution from Teleran.

These guys are amazing and have a great solution for customers that are running Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle or DB2 (no Teradata yet). They have created specialized listeners in their iSight tool that watches the traffic and logs the activity in real-time. They even have a universe and reports already built using SAP BusinessObjects so that you can get up and going quickly. If you find a particular query is taking to long, perhaps you need to tune the universe and tweek the database. Teleran can show you the problem.

If you are having problems with user generating bad SQL, out-of-compliance queries, or if you simply want to add additional governs around the system they also have a tool called iGuard. iGuard is integrated directly into tools like WebIntelligence, so instead of a user getting a message like, “Query Error ODBC – Unable to Connect”, then can get a message like, “The product server is currently down for maintenance. Please try again in 25 minutes”. Now THAT is user friendliness.

Because Teleran understands how SAP BusinessObjects works, even if you are using a single user id such as “report_user” at the database level, Teleran can read the user, universe and connection, etc. information and let you easily audit who is doing what at the database level. Don’t worry about turning on database logging and slowing down your production database. You can offload the work to Teleran.

The Greatest Part of All

The greatest part of Teleran is not that it’s a great solution for SAP BusinessObjects managers and administrators, it’s great for the entire EDW. Why? Because Teleran runs between the database and the query tool and is NOT SAP BusinessObjects dependent. You see, it can monitor ALL queries – not just queries from BusinessObjects. This means that if you have users access the database via TOAD, you can turn it off. You can turn off access to any unauthorized reporting/SQL generating tool.

To me, this seems like a must have solution for organizations who are struggling to get a handle on their data warehouse and need to make sure they are delivering a robust and high performing environment.

Check it out! You’ll be glad you did.

SAP and Business Objects – The Two Shall Become One

Just moments ago regulators approved the merger between the two companies.

Here is the release from the associated press posted to Forbes:

U.S. antitrust regulators approved SAP AG’s $6.8 billion purchase of Paris-based software company Business Objects SA, the Federal Trade Commission said Wednesday.

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I psyched about the whole Business Objects/SAP merger. I think it’s the perfect next step. Business Objects will be able to retain it’s independent status while providing the best Business Intelligence solutions in the marketplace today. I never thought I’d work for a company that delivers tools a ubiquitous as Crystal Reports and as global as SAP R3/BW.