ORLANDO —

With the power to pull from virtually nearly unlimited sources, the 4.1 version of SAP BusinessObjects BI solutions aims to enable customers to actualize their data and push resulting insights beyond data scientists directly to decision-makers and frontline workers, all in real time. The professional-grade platform is intended to set the standard for any size business, any IT infrastructure and for all users in an organization. Planned  features in the latest release include:

• Unified and highly personalized platform with improved interoperability and usability across the BI suite
• Powerful visualizations, including the recently launched SAP Lumira software,  that empower end users with industry-focused visualizations and spatial analytics
• Big data ready with support for Amazon Elastic MapReduce and Hadoop Hive. Improved access to Oracle’s Exadata, OLAP and Essbase. The 4.1 release also includes enhanced workflow capabilities in conjunction with the SAP HANA platform and SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse application
• New SAP Crystal Server software and the Edge edition of SAP BusinessObjects BI software tailored to small and midsize companies

“This release will best serve our customer’s needs of providing end-users with autonomy while empowering IT to provide a BI solution that allows for standardizing and sharing of information,” said Adam Binnie, general manager and global vice president,  Business Intelligence, SAP. “Our customers are demanding big data-ready solutions that seamlessly incorporate real time data streams and can handle multiple data sources. The 4.1 version of SAP BusinessObjects BI delivers on that promise.”

For announcements, blog posts, videos and other coverage during SAPPHIRE NOW, visit the SAP Newsroom. Follow SAP on Twitter at @sapnews and @SAPanalytics.

SAPPHIRE NOW
With SAPPHIRE NOW, SAP offers its customers, partners and prospects even more opportunities to engage in dialogue with peers, participants and thought leaders around the globe. Being held in Orlando, Florida, May 14-16, 2013, this enhanced, real-time event connects attendees on site with global participants through state-of-the-art broadcast studios and an online experience that incorporates the latest social media and community functionality. Whether on site or online, participants can gain insight as to how SAP is delivering on its product strategy and helping organizations around the world to run better. For more information, visit www.sapphirenow.com. Follow SAPPHIRE NOW on Twitter at @SAPPHIRENOW and visit the SAP Newsroom at www.news-sap.com.

All other product and service names mentioned are the trademarks of their respective companies.

Media Contact:
Jason Grosse, +1 (415) 694-8554, jason.grosse@sap.com, PDT

WALLDORF —

• Visualize any amount of data in real time in a repeatable, self-service way
• Accelerate decision-making with fact-based answers to business questions
• Increase self-service data usage without adding to the IT workload

“In today’s big data environment, companies need to capture the massive amounts of data and be able to quickly make sense of it all,” said Dan Vesset, program vice president, IDC. “This means going beyond basic reports and spreadsheets to a truly self-service approach designed for ease of use and that delivers a combination of speed and engaging visualizations. SAP Lumira and SAP Lumira Cloud are a new options for enterprise self-service BI.”

SAP Lumira extends beyond the desktop to the cloud. Built in HTML5, SAP Lumira Cloud makes development and delivery of new analysis quicker and helps reduce the need for IT support. It also allows for out-of-the-box integration with on-premise data and provides huge scale with native support for SAP HANA. With SAP Lumira Cloud, users can:

• Share, create and interact with data visualizations in the cloud
• Upload, download and share documents from SAP Lumira, making it easy to access documents from anywhere and collaborate
• Publish datasets from SAP Lumira to SAP Lumira Cloud
• Create, explore and share data sets and analytics via Web browsers or mobile devices.
• Upload and share other types of documents, such as documents from SAP Crystal Reports software, files from SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio and Microsoft Excel spreadsheets

Standard and personal editions of SAP Lumira are available today on SAP Store. During SAPPHIRE NOW, being held May 14–16 in Orlando, Florida, attendees will receive a special offer to buy SAP Lumira. It is also available on a trial basis.

For more information, visit the SAP Newsroom. Follow SAP on Twitter at @sapnews and @SAPanalytics.

Next Major Event: SAPPHIRE NOW
With SAPPHIRE NOW, SAP offers its customers, partners and prospects even more opportunities to engage in dialogue with peers, participants and thought leaders around the globe. Being held in Orlando, Florida, May 14-16, 2013, this enhanced, real-time event connects attendees on site with global participants through state-of-the-art broadcast studios and an online experience that incorporates the latest social media and community functionality. Whether on site or online, participants can gain insight as to how SAP is delivering on its product strategy and helping organizations around the world to run better. For more information, visit www.sapphirenow.com. Follow SAPPHIRE NOW on Twitter at @SAPPHIRENOW and visit the SAP Newsroom at www.news-sap.com.

Media Contact:
Jason Grosse, +1 (415) 694-8554, jason.grosse@sap.com, PDT

WALLDORF —

“An important element to unlocking the value of big data through business analytics is being able to push real-time insight to all levels of enterprise employees,” said Dan Vesset, program vice president, Business Analytics at IDC. “Close to 40 percent of enterprises are planning to increase the number of users with mobile access to their BI and analytics solutions. Once an analytics platform is in place, these organizations can benefit significantly from a faster and lower risk solution, like the SAP Mobile Analytics rapid-deployment solution, for extending that platform with mobile capabilities to drive real-time decision-making.”

SAP Mobile Analytics offers comprehensive, real-time access on the performance and metrics of a company through popular mobile devices. Workers no longer need to go through a chain of processes to get the information they need. The data is presented through a user-friendly mobile app that can produce reports, charts and graphs. A sync option with SAP HANA significantly bolsters the quality and speed in analytics mobile apps, enabling workers to pull down analytics in a fraction of the time. All the end users and generated content are managed on a single platform, cutting down on complexity. As part of an end-to-end solution, customers can achieve broader capabilities by layering additional rapid-deployment solutions along with SAP Mobile Analytics in an “assemble-to-order” approach.

“SAP is extending the power of SAP HANA and BI to mobile devices in the enterprise,” said Bernd Welz, senior vice president and global head, Solution & Knowledge Packaging, SAP. “We are bringing workers closer to analytics all within a framework that any enterprise customer can deploy with lower costs and fewer risks along the way.”

For more information, visit the SAP Newsroom. Follow SAP on Twitter at @sapnews and @SAPrds.

Media Contacts:
Martin Gwisdalla, SAP, +49 (6227) 7-67275, martin.gwisdalla@sap.com, CET
Anthony Suarez, Burson-Marsteller, +1 (212) 614-4331, anthony.suarez@bm.com, EDT

According to these findings, over half of consumers (fifty-one percent) want to be able to talk about companies without them listening. However, forty-eight percent of consumers would allow companies to listen if the goal is to improve products and services. And fifty-eight percent believe that businesses should only respond to complaints in social media. What’s a business to do?

Lisa Joy Rosner, Chief Marketing Officer of NetBase, unequivocally says to keep listening. She relates story after story of how companies of all sizes turn customer insights into profits. A major food company changed the placement of products in the grocery store based on customers’ eating patterns and increased sales. Another company found out their customers liked the product and pricing but hated the commercial. In response, the company changed the commercial and sold more products. Then they were able to see people complaining about running out of the product and adjusted their supply chain to increase inventory where it was needed.

NetBase has partnered with SAP to develop SAP Social Media Analytics, an industrial strength solution that gathers and processes billions of onlineconversations in real-time. With deep natural language processing capabilities, this analytics solution delivers all-important context that helps companiesunderstand the nuances, including things like sarcasm, irony, and word play. Misunderstanding conversations is just as damaging as not listening at all.

Privacy concerns notwithstanding, social is powerful because all businesses are about human interaction, whether customers are people in other businesses or consumers. At my company, SAP, teams use SAP Social Media Analytics on a daily basis to check online sentiment about our solutions, and create daily monitoring reports that are sent to executive management. The reports capture every conversation in blogs, news, and more encompassing volume, sentiment, questions, and feedback. They are instrumental in finding out customer wants, needs, and concerns, especially with new technologies such as SAP HANA that powers our real-time business platform.

SAP is in good company. According to B2B Magazine, 56% of business-to-business marketers plan to increase their spending on social media in 2013. Social media sites and other online sources will continue to be the first stop for consumers and business people in search of information. In an always-on world, company’s and customers can’t easily pull down the blinds. The challenge is making sure we don’t get too close to jeopardize comfort.

This post originally appeared on SAP Business Trends.

WALLDORF —

SAP Visual Intelligence helps users tap into spreadsheet data to bring together and transform data in order to discover hidden insights and answers. Designed for ease of use, the software combines fast data manipulation with engaging visualizations. In addition, point-and-click data manipulation allows users to organize and consolidate data the way they want it, quickly and without a single line of code or an additional modeling layer. SAP Visual Intelligence gives users the ability to:

• Combine and transform enterprise and personal data sources in a repeatable, self-service way
• Maximize business knowledge with big picture insights and granular details
• Create beautiful graphics and visualizations to convey and share knowledge

“Visual intelligence enables customers to go beyond the spreadsheet to harness their data, big and small. Taking control of data is a critical step to success,” said John Schweitzer, senior vice president and general manager, Analytics, SAP. “The personal edition of SAP Visual Intelligence is one of the fastest, most engaging ways to get answers from spreadsheets. Users simply point-and-click to manipulate and organize data just the way they want it. By pulling data from different sources into a single view, users can answer questions quickly and discover unique insights within their business without having to rely on IT.”

The personal edition of SAP Visual Intelligence is available for US$99.

For more information, visit the SAP Newsroom. Follow SAP on Twitter at @sapnews.

Media Contact:
Jason Grosse, +1 (415) 694-8554, jason.grosse@sap.com, PDT

Companies around the world lose US$3.5 trillion to fraud each year, according to a report by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners last year. More than one-fifth of cases in the study lost at least US$1 million to fraud, and the average loss of revenue per organization is 5 percent annually.

India’s Serious Fraud Investigation Office (SFIO) will soon release a report about “alleged financial irregularities” with sporting outfitter Reebok, The Hindu Business Line noted Monday. And SIFO announced last week its intention to develop an early warning fraud detection system, which the agency hopes to deploy by June.

Organizations that want to combat fraud need not wait until the summer for a solution. SAP announced Tuesday a new analytic application to help enterprises detect, investigate, analyze and prevent fraud in Big Data environments. Companies across many industries can use SAP Fraud Management to:

• Identify fraud sooner than ever: Real-time detection integrates capabilities into business systems and alerts users to suspicious activity, leading to reduced financial loss.
• Improve detection accuracy: Real-time calibration and simulations on large volumes of data minimize false positives.
• Prevent and deter fraud situations: Rules and predictive methods can help users optimize their analysis, adapting measures to deceptive patterns and better preventing fraud.

Outmaneuvering Tax Evasion
The SAP HANA platform powers Fraud Management, which is part of the company’s solutions portfolio for governance, risk management and compliance (GRC). So SAP understandably chose to announce the new analytic application at GRC 2013 in Las Vegas this week.

Corporate fraud includes “activities undertaken by an individual or company that are … designed to give an [illegal] advantage to the perpetrating individual or company,” according to Investopedia. “Corporate fraud schemes … are marked by their complexity and economic impact on the business.”

That includes the business of government, as tax evasion and social services fraud exacerbate budget deficits. SAP Fraud Management users can cross-check tax returns and social service applications against millions of related data records in real-time, and SAP HANA’s predictive algorithms can uncover hidden fraud patterns that conventional tools might have missed.

High Cost of Fraud
“Corporate fraud can be difficult to prevent and to catch,” as Investopedia noted. “By creating effective policies, a system of checks and balances and physical security, a company may limit the extent to which fraud can take place.”

Fraudulent insurance claims and associated costs are at historical highs, showcasing the weaknesses of traditional fraud detection methods and their low recovery rates. SAP Fraud Management for Insurance can help insurance companies automate detection, improve investigations and avoid paying illegitimate claims.

Cynics might say that stopping fraudsters is just about keeping money in the hands of power.

But it can safeguard a company’s reputation. Just ask the board of directors at Reebok.

And it can save taxpayers money. The citizens of Christchurch can surely tell you how their lost money could have better been spent.

Related Media:
“Report to the Nations On Occupational Fraud and Abuse” by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners
“Rebuild fraud could top $1.5 billion” on TV3
“SFIO finalising report into alleged fraud at Reebok” in The Hindu Business Line

This post originally appeared on SAP Business Trends.

LAS VEGAS — March 19, 2013 —

The typical organization is at risk of losing up to five percent of its revenues to fraud[1]. In 2011, the total potential projected worldwide losses due to fraud were $3.5 trillion[1]. SAP Fraud Management is intended to help companies address potential, significant losses due to fraud; the high cost and effort for fraud investigation and false alarms; difficulties in keeping track of changing fraud behaviors; and the inadequate or obsolete detection capabilities associated with newer fraud patterns. As part of the broader portfolio of SAP solutions for governance, risk, and compliance (GRC), SAP Fraud Management is planned to be adaptable to unique business needs and varying industries, in order to:

• Detect fraud earlier to reduce financial loss: The application is planned to provide real-time detection that leverages the power of SAP HANA and offers robust integration capabilities into business systems, along with alert notification and management features
• Improve detection accuracy at less cost: SAP Fraud Management aims to help minimize false positives through real-time calibration and simulation capabilities on large volumes of data
• Prevent and deter fraud situations: With the combination of rules and predictive methods, SAP Fraud Management is intended to help users optimize fraud scenario analysis and adapt measures to changing fraud patterns to better prevent fraud

“The rise of big data is forcing organizations to improve their governance, risk and compliance efforts. Being able to validate who did what, and provide a defensible audit trail, is key in addressing potential fraud,” said Michael Rasmussen, chief pundit, GRC 20/20. “There is a potential for organizations to face massive loss due to fraud. This is becoming even more of a risk with the ever-increasing amount of data being generated. Helping customers detect even a fraction of these cases would represent significant savings — employing advanced solutions to help detect and deter fraud makes sense.”

A Compelling Case for the Insurance Industry
Fraudulent insurance claims and associated costs are at historical highs. In the U.S., insurance companies are faced with non-health-related insurance fraud of more than US$40 billion per year, while the Association of British Insurers cites more than 2,500 fraudulent claims per week, totaling more than GPB 900 million per year[2]. Insurers can no longer afford traditional fraud detection methods with low recovery rates. Developed with leading international insurance companies in a co-innovation development model, the SAP Fraud Management for Insurance analytic application is planned to offer:

• Closed-loop fraud processing: detection and prevention of claim fraud across multiple line of business with direct impact on the loss ratio
• Seamless Integration: real-time information flow between fraud and claim processing in both directions to help ensure consistency and optimized process flows
• Optimized Investigation: intuitive functionality and alerts, supporting investigators from first fraud signal to final decision

SAP Fraud Management for Insurance is intended to help insurance companies automate fraud detection, improve fraud investigation efficiency and avoid payments on illegitimate claim requests.

Savings for Government At All Levels Through Early Fraud Detection
Tax evasion and social services fraud not only hurt the reputation of government agencies, but contribute to ever-increasing budget deficits. SAP Fraud Management is planned to help reduce fraud and non-compliance by cross-checking tax returns or social service applications against millions of related data records in real time and immediately spotting whether the submitted applications match information from other data sources. Applying predictive algorithms from SAP HANA on a large number of transactions aims to uncover hidden fraud patterns and produce alerts on suspicious transactions that might be missed by conventional fraud and compliance rules.

“With organizations at risk of losing five percent of their revenues due to fraud, companies need better analytical tools to identify and prevent fraud before losses occur and to stay apace with changing fraud behaviors — in real time,” said John Schweitzer, senior vice president and general manager, Analytics, SAP. “SAP Fraud Management powered by SAP HANA will enable enterprises in all industries to detect, investigate, prevent and monitor irregularities or fraud in environments with ultra-high volumes of data, from both SAP and non-SAP systems. With SAP HANA as its backbone, SAP Fraud Management aims to bring unprecedented processing capabilities.”

For more information, visit the SAP Newsroom.

[1]2012 Report to the Nations on Occupational Fraud and Abuse, Association of Certified Fraud Examiners
[2]Association of British Insurers

For more information, press only:
Jason Grosse, +1 (415) 694-8554, jason.grosse@sap.com, PDT
SAP Press Office, +49 (6227) 7-46315, CET; +1 (610) 661-3200, EDT; press@sap.com

But with analytical tools that are more user-friendly than ever and breakthroughs in in-memory computing, analytics is moving out of the back room and into the board room — as well as the sales representative’s iPads and the call center agent’s cross-selling prompts. Today, analytics can provide more than just quantifiable insights into what happened in the past. Analytics can provide suggestions, refined in real time, about what we might want to do next — in the next quarter, in the next sales visit, even in the next statement we make to a customer.

If you liked that…
Anyone who has browsed for a book on Amazon knows about its recommendations. Behind the scenes, analytical engines are busily identifying books with similar characteristics, books that customers who’ve bought this book have also bought, even books that other customers have purchased after looking at a given book on the website (even if they have not actually purchased that book). It’s all useful information for customers who, once upon a time, would simply have asked their local bookseller, “What’s new that I’d like?”

These approaches to analysis and recommendation are finding their ways into all aspects of business today. Sales and marketing teams are looking at what their customers have purchased in the past to discover what they might want to buy in the future. They’re doing the white space analysis to see what customers A, B, and C have bought that similar customers X, Y, and Z have not yet purchased (and vice versa).

Service teams are performing predictive analytics, too: They’re looking at trend lines for product returns and repairs and then proactively reaching out to customers who have not yet encountered problems with these products to sell services.

Adding real-time to the formula
While the use of analytics in these business contexts represents a real departure from the back-office analytics of the past, they do share one aspect in common with those Nerds-Only analytical efforts: most of these analytical efforts involve a significant amount computing resources and a significant amount of time. The simple physics of performing an analysis on a huge data store — which may cross hundreds of disk spindles – precludes the possibility of performing these analyses in real time. Using traditional approaches, you can perform the analysis you want, capture the details, and then use the details in real time as you make your plans, engage with your customers, or offer recommendations on your website to drive customers to products they might find interesting.

But if you could perform these complex analyses in real time, that would open whole new possibilities. You could work with real-time data, not data that was old as soon as the analytical snapshot was saved. You could potentially even refine the nature of your analysis while you were engaging with the customer – factoring new information or new needs into the analysis to come up with recommendations that are even more tailored and more personalized to the customer with whom you are engaging.

That’s where today’s in-memory computing technologies come in. With the ability to process and analyze huge volumes of data in memory, in real time, opportunities for analytically-enabled engagements blossom in ways we have never known before. We can monitor trends in real-time, learn from emerging insights, and refine our interactions based on those insights – all on an ongoing basis.

That has significant ramifications for every aspect of business — from the ability to make automated micro-adjustments to your supply chain to the ability to understand just what and when to up-sell a customer who’s calling into the call center, visiting a webpage, or using a location-aware mobile application. Instead of executing inflexibly against a marketing and sales plan that you hope will work, you can execute flexibly against a marketing and sales plan that is being reviewed and refined in real time.

What would such real-time analytical capabilities enable you to do? Tell us in the comments.

This post originally appeared on Forbes BrandVoice.

BOSTON —

SAP Scouting will bring together the power of cloud and in-memory technologies to help teams take a major step forward in incorporating the use of technology to help drive key player personnel decisions. With the solution, sports teams across leagues will be able to continuously and systematically improve their scouting and player evaluation processes. SAP Scouting will enable teams to:

• Provide scouts, executives, coaches and trainers with the ability to access and easily enter player evaluations with a modern, easy-to-use application powered by the SAP HANA platform, the in-memory computing platform from SAP
• Create a complete and unified picture of each prospect by bringing together information from qualitative evaluations with quantitative information from scouting databases and other sources
• Compare prospects in real time and benchmark them against professionals at their position
• Collaborate to develop a draft-day strategy with an interactive draft board

These capabilities will empower teams to transform scouting and player evaluation processes, making them more efficient so that they can execute faster, smarter and simpler as they prepare for draft day. By creating a persistent, player-centric data model, teams will also be able to create a strong foundation for the application of more advanced analytics for roster optimization in the future.

“We continue to work in partnership with SAP in an effort to develop a comprehensive, state of the art solution for our scouting department,” said San Francisco 49ers General Manager Trent Baalke. “It is being designed to collect, manage and view every aspect our scouting department utilizes to evaluate a prospect’s current and projected level of performance. While its development is ongoing, the solution is already helping us analyze testing and performance data at a level previously unavailable to our department.”

“SAP is committed to delivering world-class solutions that help teams improve on-field performance and enhance the fan experience,” said Vishal Sikka, member of the Executive Board of SAP AG, Technology and Innovation. “By partnering with the San Francisco 49ers, true visionaries in the sports industry, we’ve been able to develop a groundbreaking solution based on the SAP HANA platform that will help them drive a competitive edge.”

SAP Scouting is one solution in a wider portfolio that SAP offers for the sports and entertainment industry. The offerings include real-time analytics and applications that enable sports franchises to maximize team performance, deepen fan engagement, optimize business efficiency and support them in maximizing revenues.

For more information, visit the SAP Newsroom.

For more information, press only:
Jeff Neal, +1 (925) 336-6203, jeff.neal@sap.com, PST
SAP Press Office, +49 (6227) 7-46315, CET; +1 (610) 661-3200, EST; press@sap.com

WALLDORF —

“In hockey, the insights that statistical data can provide, really spice up the game,” said Gernot Tripcke, managing director of DEL. “We are pleased to provide such a high-quality service to our fans, thanks to our new partner.”

Using powerful analytics tools from SAP, fans will be able to interactively track hockey statistics, such as opponent, penalty or player scoring analysis in real time. Access to these tools will begin with the 2013/2014 season. SAP will be featured as favored technology partner on the DEL.org website, brining thousands of hockey fans in contact with SAP technology for the first time.

“We are putting the most interesting data about the league, teams and players directly into the hands of hockey fans,” said Gerhard Oswald, member of the Executive Board of SAP AG. “We are thrilled to partner with the German Ice Hockey Association to help make game day even more engaging and exciting for everyone.”

The technology is already being showcased at the SAP Arena for Adler Mannheim games. SAP has long-standing sponsoring partnerships with the SAP Arena and the Adler Mannheim ice hockey team. SAP is already providing millions of fans with new ways to connect to their favorite sports through sponsorships of the National Football Association (NFL) and the National Basketball Association (NBA).

For more information, visit the SAP Newsroom. Follow SAP on Twitter at @sapnews.

Media Contact:
Alicia Lenze, +49 (6227) 7-40445, alicia.lenze@sap.com, CET