By Helen Dwight, Sr. Director, Analytics Solution Marketing, SAP
In the recently published Gartner report, Market Share Analysis: Business Intelligence, Analytics and Performance Management, Worldwide, 2011, SAP was ranked #1, with a 23.6 percent share of the worldwide market. It’s clear from the report that SAP’s growth rate is strong. In order to continue this market momentum – and create more focus – we’re changing the branding of our analytics solutions at SAP in three main ways.
1. SAP is now the globally recognized brand for analytics. As such, we’ve decided to simplify how we talk about our analytics solutions. Instead of business analytics, you’ll now see references to analytics or analytics solutions from SAP. With the lines between the business and consumer worlds blurring when it comes to analytics, we no longer need the term “business.”
2. As a result of the dominance SAP has in the analytics market, we’ve decided to focus the SAP brand on the analytics category and have rebranded the following portfolios and their associated solutions so they simply adopt the SAP master brand.
| Old Name | New Name | Example |
| SAP BusinessObjects EIM solutions | SAP solutions for EIM | SAP Data Integrator |
| SAP BusinessObjects EPM solutions | SAP solutions for EPM | SAP Business Planning and Consolidation |
| SAP BusinessObjects GRC solutions | SAP solutions for GRC | SAP Access Control |
| SAP BusinessObjects analytic applications | analytic applications | SAP Sales Analysis for Retail |
3. The BusinessObjects brand has long been associated with a commitment to openness, innovation, and enterprise scale that’s shaped and dominated the business intelligence (BI) market for over 22 years. As such we’re focusing the value of the SAP BusinessObjects brand on our business intelligence solutions. All of our BI solutions will retain the current SAP BusinessObjects branding without any change. For example SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards, SAP BusinessObjects Explorer, and SAP BusinessObjects Analysis will retain their current names.
The Effective Date for This Change
The name changes are effective immediately, as of May10, 2012. In the coming weeks, you’ll see it rolled out across Web content, product names, the service marketplace, and anywhere else the names are used. We’ll also communicate these updates throughout the year at venues like SAPPHIRE NOW in Orlando, Florida, SAPinsider events, and regional user–group meetings globally.
We’re currently updating all of our communication materials, solution documentation, and other internal and external materials and content in accordance with the above changes, including the SAP Support Portal. In addition, we’re making changes within the applications themselves, as appropriate. In some cases, there may be a delay in renaming the EIM, EPM, GRC, and analytic applications solutions, so you may still see the old names used during this period. All updates will be made as quickly as possible.
Where to Ask Questions or Get Additional Information
Should you have a specific question or request, we’ll do our best to get you an answer as quickly as possible. The best way to contact us for additional information is to comment on this post.We’ll review comments and reply as appropriate. If your question needs a more specific answer, we’ll put you in contact with the appropriate individual(s).
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May 24th, 2012 at 3:55 pm
I had always considered Analytics to be an advanced area of Business Intelligence. It looks now like SAP is differentiating them.
Why does SAP not consider Analytics to be a branch of Business Intelligence? Please explain the difference, so I can better understand the SAP perspective. If there is some external literature on the subject that you could provide, that would be great.
Thank you.
Sincerely,
Steven Hendel
SAP BI Architect
Wawa, Inc.
Media, PA USA
May 29th, 2012 at 11:52 am
Thanks for your feedback Steven. Business intelligence is a very significant part of SAP’s portfolio of analytics solutions, and we are certainly not intending to separate business intelligence from analytics.
At SAP, our analytics solutions encompass a number of categories in addition to business intelligence. These include enterprise performance management (EPM), governance, risk and compliance (GRC) and analytic applications. To read more about our analytics solutions, please visit our website at http://www.sap.com/solutions/analytics/why-sap-analytics.epx.
Our branding changes are intended to simplify our product naming structure and to focus the BusinessObjects brand on business intelligence solutions, where it has a strong reputation for excellence and innovation.
Broadly speaking our definition is consistent with the definition of analytics as a category used by leading market research firms. As an example, you can see IDC’s definition of business analytics solutions here: http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=IDC_P181.
That said we recognize a number of key trends in the market which differentiate SAP’s offering in the market including the role of social collaboration and the consumerization of analytic solutions which why we use “analytics” rather than “business analytics” as we believe analytics have a key role to play in a broader context than just the enterprise, and in doing so have greater impact and value.
Hope this helps and adds some clarification.
Regards,
James Fisher
VP Marketing, Analytics, SAP
May 29th, 2012 at 12:03 pm
Why is GRC products classified as Analytic solutions?
June 5th, 2012 at 1:52 pm
So, why is GRC in SAP’s Analytics portfolio?
The answer is quite simple. So simple, I can say it in one word. Risk.
Risk is too often an element of businesses’ strategies, tactics, operations, plans, processes and more that is overlooked or not well enough understood. Obviously, risks can rob businesses of the value that they create. But is enough being done to mitigate risk? And are the mitigation efforts targeting the right risks? Well, answering these questions requires you to analyze your business and your risks.
Information about risk should, in many cases, accompany information about other aspects of the business so that executives, managers or any other decision maker can see and understand the risks. This means that they must know the risks present, the current risk level, how that risk level is trending, what efforts are underway to minimize the impact or prevent the risk, and how successful those efforts have been. Decision makers should be empowered with all of the risk information so that they can make more well-informed decisions. Complementing the typical information set with relevant risk information is critical whether you are conveying financial reports to the management team or supplier information to your supply chain teams or employee safety training information to your plant safety teams.
And this is why our GRC portfolio is part of the larger Analytics portfolio.