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SAP Will Bow In-Memory Technology at Sapphire | Intelligent Enterprise Blog

In Context, by Doug Henschen
Doug Henschen joined Intelligent Enterprise as Editor in 2004 and was named Editor-in-Chief in January 2007. He has specialized in covering the intersection of business intelligence, performance management, business process management and rules management technologies within enterprise applications and architectures.
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SAP Will Bow In-Memory Technology at Sapphire

Posted by Doug Henschen
Monday, May 11, 2009
4:49 PM

Two colleagues at TechWeb have learned from high-level sources that SAP will introduce this week at Sapphire something called SAP BusinessObjects Explorer. There's little doubt that this is a combination of the SAP BusinessObjects Polestar interface and Business Warehouse Accelerator (BWA) in-memory database technology. The vendor has been talking about this combination for some months and it even demonstrated it last year.

The benefit of BWA (formerly BI Accelerator) is fast querying powered by in-memory database technology. Polestar is an easy-to-use interface that lets you query data with the ease of an Internet search engine using natural language rather than SQL statements. As I described in this post from just over a year ago, the combination is compelling:

"Donald McCormick popped open an instance of Polestar running on [BWA] on top of a Business Warehouse said to be running at SAP's headquarters in Walldorf, Germany. Clicks between dimensions showed that the analyses were examining about one billion records, yet the lag between views was little more than a second. Most importantly, the in-memory approach means "there are no pre-defined paths, and I didn't have to pre-define hierarchies," said McCormick. Users have "full latitude to explore all available data in the warehouse."

SAP has scheduled a big press conference for Tuesday, and I'll be anxious to see A) whether the integration goes beyond the Polestar interface (to conventional query tools) and B) whether (and how far) it goes beyond SAP BW as a data source. The broader the better and more exciting this will be, but I'm not sure how the software heart of the BWA appliance can be targeted at non-BW sources.

As we recently discovered when we published Cindi Howson's excellent "Insight at the Speed of Thought" analysis of in-memory technology, readers have a big interest in in-memory capabilities. That's why platform giants and independents alike have been investing in the category. QlikTech, TIBCO Spotfire and IBM Cognos (formerly Applix) TM1 are among the best-known in-memory products. MicroStrategy added in-memory analysis in its Version 9 release earlier this year and Microsoft has announced very publically it will add it in 2010 through the Project Gemini release. To download Cindi's full "Insight at the Speed of Thought" report, click here (registration required).

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