SAP and HP Ally on Business Intelligence

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SAP and HP on Tuesday announced an expanded partnership agreement to integrate the software vendor’s Business Warehouse and business intelligence tools with HP’s Neoview data warehouse, making it easier for users to mine data housed in non-SAP applications and manage enormous reservoirs of customer data.

The joint offering will be available for purchase from both companies and takes dead aim at Exadata 2, the data warehousing and online transaction processing (OTLP) suite Oracle developed on Sun Microsystems servers.

“There are a growing number of SAP BW customers facing an explosion of content, requiring scalability levels from the tens to the hundreds of terabytes,” said Franz Aman, vice president of intelligence platform product marketing at SAP Business Objects. “To meet this need, it isn’t sufficient to just provide any ordinary database — or if you will — a BW car with a standard engine.”

“With this integrated, end-to-end BI offering, customers now get Ferrari and Porsche engine options, and you can expect us to break the posted limits,” he added.

HP, which acquired Neoware for $214 million in 2007, and SAP are currently developing tighter integration between the Neoview data warehousing appliance and SAP’s NetWeaver Business Warehouse. SAP officials said there are currently more than 4,300 deployments of BW running on a variety of HP platforms.

Company officials said customer beta testing will begin in the first quarter of 2010 and will be available to customers for purchase sometime in the second quarter.

“As we are talking to customers, we hear their need for real-time access to their growing volumes of mission critical business information,” said Kristina Robinson, vice president and general manager of HP’s business intelligence group. “Through the integration of HP Neoview and SAP NetWeaver BW, customers will have improved scalability and flexibility within their data warehouse on several dimensions such as number of users, data size, as well as volume and mix of queries.”

SAP, Oracle and IBM have all made significant investments and pulled the trigger on 10-figure acquisitions to get their hands on best-of-breed BI application suites.

IBM shelled out $5 billion for Cognos in late 2007. SAP picked up Business Objects for $7.5 billion in October 2007 and Oracle swallowed up Hyperion for $3.3 billion in March 2007.

As the economy continues to meltdown, BI is viewed as one of the better IT investments for cash-strapped enterprise customers, according to analysts at Gartner and IDC. BI software sales are expected to grow from just under $6 billion last year to more than $7.7 billion by 2012.

Now that these top-tier vendors have their BI tools, they need to improve the scalability of the data warehousing appliances and applications storing all this valuable data and make it easier to access and analyze data from their own business applications as well as those developed by their competitors.

Along with Oracle’s Exadata 2 offering, SAP also has to fend off IBM which on Friday rolled out its own “Exadata 2 killer,” a new pureScale feature that brings mainframe-level scalability to its rack-mount DB2 database servers.

Article courtesy of InternetNews.com.