Midsize companies like yours need business intelligence (BI) solutions that are both power-ful and affordable. The latest release of SAP® BusinessObjects™ Edge BI software, built on the same technology foundation as the SAP BusinessObjects BI platform, provides new levels of refined, intuitive functionality for all your business users – and real-world deploy-ment flexibility at an accessible price.

ExEcutivE Summary

Business intelligence for midsize companiesSAP BusinessObjects Edge BI is designed and packaged to serve as a powerful intelligence platform for heterogeneous environments in midsize companies – a platform that meets your requirements today and supports your growth in the future. The software is available in three versions:

• Standard package • With data integration • With data management

This document is focused on the version with data integration.

SEEk agilE and timEly accESS to data

One of the key challenges many growing companies face today is containing and managing an explosion of data. As organiza-tions grow, both organically and through mergers and acquisi-tions, such problems continue to mount. Exponential growth in data causes CIOs to question how they can best utilize strained and limited resources. Complex tools require specialized, time-consuming training, driving demand for an integrated, flexible information management environment.

SaP Solutions for Small Businesses and midsize companies

SAP® BusinessObjects™ Edge BI Software with Data IntegrationTimely, Accurate, and Trusted Information for Growing Companies

To gain control over your data, you need to build an agile and trusted data foundation that can rapidly respond to the infor-mation demands of operational or analytical processes and systems. Such a foundation requires data integration capabili-ties that can help you deliver trusted information across the enterprise.

SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI, version with data integration, lets you:

• Obtain a single version of the truth throughout the company • Unlock insights hidden in unstructured text source • Ensure fast data integration performance

SinglE vErSion of thE truth throughout thE comPany

Fast-changing environment and compliance regulations require IT organizations with growing companies to deliver timely, accurate, and auditable information throughout the company. To meet these challenges, growing companies need a single view of their organization, improved data quality, visi-bility into the impact of source changes, and traceability of data back to the source systems.

SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI software, version with data inte-gration, helps ensure the quality of your data with advanced data profiling, which allows you to understand the content, structure, quality, and relationships between tables in your source data. The data validation feature helps you build a fire-wall between your source and target systems, so you can filter out unwanted data based on your business rules.

Throughout the extraction, transformation, and load (ETL) process, SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI software, version with data integration, audits data to verify its integrity. SAP BusinessObjects Data Services software can provide additional data quality functionality to cleanse data of any operational domain (such as customer, product, or service).

Additionally, SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI software, version with data integration, lets you perform a wide range of data transformations. Choose from a library of powerful, extensible, and reusable transforms for operations such as: unstructured data, hierarchy flattening for XML files, XML pipelining, pivot and reverse-pivot of rows and columns, slowly changing dimen-sions, change data capture, data validation, and data cleansing.

From an IT perspective, SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI software, version with data integration, provides the ability to see how a change in source data can affect downstream processes and systems through metadata analysis. The software provides ready-to-go integration with metadata from the BI layer of SAP BusinessObjects Edge solutions. This metadata integration provides systemwide impact analysis that allows you to see the effect of changes in the source systems down to the BI reports. As a result, you can more easily manage change across your ETL and BI environment.

From a business perspective, a huge benefit of metadata inte-gration is data lineage, which enables information consumers to view the context of data in their reports. The software allows users to see when data was updated, how it was computed, and where it came from – all the way back to the original

A huge benefit of metadata integration is data lineage, which enables you to view data in context and see when it was updated, how it was computed, and where it came from. This visibility is key in helping users gain better trust in their information.

transactional source. This visibility is critical in helping users gain better trust in their information and meeting compliance requirements.

unlock inSightS hiddEn in unStructurEd tExt SourcE

The text analysis functionality of SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI, version with data integration, empowers you to unlock insights hidden in unstructured text sources such as blogs, Web sites, e-mails, support logs, research, and surveys. This enables you to analyze people’s thoughts and feelings on your business, products, and services. These new insights can enable compet-itive differentiation by allowing you to measure and understand exactly where your company stands with customers and non-customers, how you compare to the competition, where you can make improvements, and what innovations or opportuni-ties you can leverage for continued growth.

With this functionality, you can: • Extract, categorize, and summarize key information from

unstructured text and convert it to a structured format so that it can be an effective data source for data integration or BI

• Tap into customer sentiments, market trends, industry buzz, and product and service issues so you can support corporate initiatives such as voice of the customer, root cause analysis, win-loss analysis, employee satisfaction, competitive intelli-gence, and customer retention

• Deploy fast, accurate, and flexible text analysis to support evolving data needs, and provide a summarized, 360-degree view of volumes of data that previously would have been overwhelming

• Extend SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI software to access and analyze information previously hidden in text – and surface the results through familiar BI tools such as SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence® software, SAP Crystal Reports® software, and dashboards

• Process unstructured text in more than 30 languages • Reduce the need for and costs of manual research and

outsourcing for unstructured data analysis

EnSurE faSt data intEgration PErformancE

SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI, version with data integration, maximizes data integration performance by intelligently push-ing the processing down to the database or mainframe plat-forms. For example, the software will leverage your database server to aggregate functions at the source level without mov-ing the data to the data integration server. With the ability to distribute processing to your source systems, the software minimizes unnecessary data movement across your network to optimize data integration performance.

The data integration software also offers comprehensive sup-port for Web services and is Web Services Interoperability (WS-I) compliant. You can publish or call a batch or real-time data integration job via Web services. The software also calls Web service–enabled applications to access virtually any data. In addition, you can use Web services to get a job status (for example, running, success, or error), access logging informa-tion (for example, trace, monitor, and error), and start or stop a real-time service.

for morE information

To learn more about how SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI, version with data integration, can deliver the advantages of a powerful BI platform to your midsize company, contact your SAP representative or visit us on the Web at www.sap.com/solutions/sapbusinessobjects/sme/edgeseries.

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