Future of BODI ?

[Thomson_ETL]

Hi,
I am really concerned about the positioning of BODI after the recent SAP acquisition.

I have a few concerns and thought I should raise it. (am a new member and what a way to start!!). I am playing a devils advocate here. I would really be happy to see some optimistic replies. (but a frank straightforward clarification will help me better)

1. Is BODI being phased out?
2. SAP targets large customers whose environments involve huge volume of data. BODI is not really great in handling huge volume of data. Will SAP dump it from developing it further?
3. SAP has its own ETL capabilities in SAP BW. I dont really know much about SAP BW or Netweaver stack, but heard that SAP doesnt really have any reason to fund the development of BODI.
4. BODI is cheap and is packaged with other BO tools. SAP might not be interested in the cheap tool at all.


My final question is this:
If you are an ETL consultant with expertise on BODI, where will you go from here?

Regards
Thomson

[JMulders]

Hi Thomson,

You raise some interesting points. I don't have extensive experience with Data Integrator but I posted the other day about an article in the latest "eWeek" about the acquisition.

According to Jon Schwarz, SAP intends to operate BO as a separate division. He didn't specifically mention DI but if you take him at his word, then DI will continue as a separate product. It would be up to the market to determine whether it would lose out to BW or other tools.

Judy

[plessiusa]

Thomson,

Further to Judy's comment, I find it unlikely that DI will disappear in the short to medium term.

As I understand it, in the next release of DI they are also bundelling in the Data Quality application (currently sold as a separate tool).

To answer your final question about where to go, we have a guy working on our team that was experienced in Informatica and had never used DI, it took him a couple of weeks to figure out DI, I suppose the opposite would also be true.

[ScoobyDoo]

I dont have too much knowledge of the SAP DI product other than that I've had a few clients with SAP that have conisdered it instead of BODI but have chosen BODI for numerous reasons, in particular its connectivity to other sources.

I would be amazed if they dumped BODI but that's just my opinion, Werner's opinon is what will carry most weight but I'm not sure if SAP will have exaplained the product roadmap to BO employees until the decision has been made.

[Thomson_ETL]

All,
Thanks for the replies. It helps me a lot.

By the way, would Werner be able to comment on this with his views?

The changes might take quite some time.... but for a guy who recently spent a lot of time (and money) to learn something and to know that it has a chance of being scrapped.... is disturbing!!

Sorry, it this distracts others from the original question, are there any resources on the web for freelancing consultants to keep in touch with Market dynamics, recent changes, discusses billing rates, etc. Would help me a lot.

By the way, sorry for distracting everyone. My original question is to discuss the future of BODI.

thanks to all.

Thomson.

[wdaehn]

By coincidence, I did not respond to this thread on Friday because of integration meetings with SAP in Walldorf. You have put me into a difficult position as roadmap discussions are not communicated to the outside per company policy and if, certainly not by me. But a couple of facts:

The SAP products in the ETL space are all tailored for SAP BW as target. And mostly SAP R/3 as a source. Therefore SAP partnered with other ETL tool vendors like Infa, Ascential and BO to close that gab. That partnership was not too successful revenue wise, mostly because companies using BW had R/3 as their main source anyway and the BW options for reading non-R3 data was good enough. Good enough to no spend extra money. But now SAP has an offering for all sources/targets.

When a customer wants to build a data warehouse, he has three options. Build all by himself with or without an ETL tool, use our RapidMarts or use BW with its prepackaged business content. So I was interested to see if our SAP RapidMart was going to get discontinued in favor of BW as that would indicate the future and the priorities. To my surprise the SAP team themselves suggested to sell Rapid Marts more agressively. They view Rapid Marts as the quick and simple, yet powerful, Data Mart. And that's what it is: A Rapid Mart is build for one source system and one reporting language. BW is seen as the Enterprise Data Warehouse, where you consolidate multiple R/3 systems and other ERPs. What we need to figure out is how to embed DI into the BW solution for getting better access to none-R3 ERPs and a migration path from Rapid Marts to BW.

BO is too big to get rid of the none SAP market. If SAP would make the move and focus on SAP access for all products only, we would quickly lose the majority of the market. And that's why SAP said right from the beginning, BO will remain a company like it is today, with a very good SAP connectivity obviously.

SAP BW is not the only area requiring Data Integration capabilities. Think about ERP migrations to R/3 - the MOVE initiative, or Master Data Management. Every team I have spoken with at SAP is actually very excited to no longer rely on external companies and have build features together. Before they had to build a standard interface and ask other ETL vendors to use it. But now, we can develop the connectivity together, for DI it would be excellent if SAP would have this or that feature....and we simply get it. BW is just a nice example. Today every ETL tool has to load into the staging area of BW and the actual integration of the data into the cubes will happen inside BW. But if you own the ETL tool, wouldn't you be willing to open up that a bit? Just for your own toolset?

Another interesting thing is, SAP teams related to BI are being transferred to Business Objects. That was communicated at the announcement of the acquisition and is now happening. So you could view it as if BO accqired the SAP BI team, not BO being accquired by SAP. Obviously SAP, as the owner of all BO shares, has quite some influence and even there, John Schwarz is still heading BO. Isn't that quite a signal to the market? I would have never thought something like that to happen...

[plessiusa]

Interesting comments Werner, thanks for the little snippets of information.

I think this may help some people rest easy, not only in the DI space, but also within BO product suite.

[Thomson_ETL]

Thanks Werner.
That helped a lot. And it excites me to know that SAP might be looking at the capabilities of BODI.

That settles my question on BODI being phased out.

The part I have yet to receive answers is this: is there any thread (i didnt find any) here that discusses market dynamics (like ETL, EII, EAI changes in market, roadmap of vendors, job opportunities and opportunity planning for consultants, etc)?

If not here, can I take the liberty to ask for external resources on the web?

(Sorry, I am somewhat new to DW. And have a free period next month which I plan to use for some training to strengthen my skillset.
My apologies if this is the wrong place for such questions.)

As a parting thought, this is the only board that seems to be providing good answers. Thank you all for the wonderful help.

Thomson.

[vincent.mcburney]

I posted some information links here but then moved them across to the Good DW/BI informational web sites thread.

[vincent.mcburney]

My two cents on the future of ODI - in data integration suites the ETL tool tends to be the star of the show. Every company does batch data integration somewhere in the organisation and often it's the dominant method of data exchange. By comparison not all companies are doing SOA or data quality or EII. Informatica and IBM data integration suites are built around a successful ETL product with additional products becoming addons.

In recent times ETL is growing even bigger as it becomes added to MDM, DW and BI super packages. The question for SAP and Business Objects is how to put ODI into more packages and how to make more money with addons and SOA capabilities. They would be crazy to get rid of it as ETL is the most popular type of data integration tool.

[biexplorer]

Some interesting views here.

http://www.it-director.com/technology/data_mgmt/content.php?cid=10334&extcmp=salesflash_global_2008_1703

regards
Prem

[Thomson_ETL]

All,
Thank you for the replies.

From above, it is apparent that things are not that bad for BODI.

Thx

[Stracy]

1. SAP R/3 to SAP BW is well-covered by other "tools" as Werner mentioned, but even those approaches are more work IMHO than it should be. The end result supports one primary method of access - BW (ok, and variants of other SAP tools). Populating BW outside of SAP's R/3 toolset is not fun, is time consuming, and relies on loosely coupled methods to ensure you perform the ETL processing correctly. Out of the box business functions in BW are tightly coupled, custom work is not.

2. When I was with BOBJ GSO, I had to work in an Extraction from SAP BW project to augment an Oracle DW, it was truly awful. BW offers very little in terms of tight sychronization of metadata export, etc. w/o other tools. I ended up having to use text exports from SAP with file layouts, etc. If we had been allowed to access the base data directly from SAP instead, it would have been a significantly lower level of effort with much higher quality and lower ongoing maintenance, effort for enhancements, etc.

3. Having extensively (ok, 2 years) used DI against SAP for extraction to an Enterprise DW based on Oracle, it is an excellent complimentary product for SAP. They do not have DI's capabilities to integrate SAP data back out of the systems into a DW.

4. DI has an excellent and dynamic metadata relationship with SAP R/3, hands-down the best I've worked with. The DI SAP datastores give you very good insight into application database tables, functions, etc. Creating efficient R/3 transforms and managing the balance of work in the SAP environment vs. how much work you perform external to SAP in your RDBMS is your main design challenge.

5. Areas of improvement - use of SAP R/3 Functions and Custom Code, invoking already existing SAP code (again usually functions with a wrapper) is a little more complex than it needs to be. In most cases the bulk of the programs wrapper had to be written as static ABAP code for SAP to allow us efficient access to SAP ABAP (I'm excluding iDocs, another subject).

6. DI Relevance Post-SAP/BOBJ - If you are early in your career and wish to add some very significant value to your resume, I strongly suggest seeking out work using DI against SAP. Rapid Mart projects are a good starting place. I expect this to be a skill in demand, more so than Oracle-to-Oracle DW work, for example. As a specialized skill it should equate to better compensation, too.

I've been in the DW space for over 15 years and have seen the gamut of ETL coding approaches, early and now-departed ETL tools, and the rise of our current ETL tools. I work at many levels from Strategy & Planning to hands-on development. Having spent the last two years putting DI through it's paces against SAP, the combined entity I hope will recognize this is one of the best value-added products in their portfolio to extend and add value, esp. when used with SAP R/3. Nothing else in the general ETL tool space is even close.

I'd say to the DI PG, "Keep up the good work, and make it even better"

- Steve

[biexplorer]

All,
Any updates on this front?

I am particularly interested in 2 things:

1. Is there a roadmap for EIM tools (BODI, BODQ, etc) in the SAP world yet? Will they be integrated / enhanced / dropped / blah / blah..? Is there any visibility as to how SAP-BW and BODI/BODS will coexist?

2. Is the market warm to the idea of a SAP - BOBJ EIM tool suite? Or are they treading this path with caution, waiting for the dust to settle down fully? Have there been enough sales on this front?

Regards,
Prem

[wdaehn]

Both worlds remain completely independent, there will be just more interfaces between the two. BW using DQ. DI reading/loading BW better. And SAP ERP interfaces as well obviously.

The only thing that really changed for us is that we have an easier way into SAP accounts, so quite a few customers look at DI these days and figure how much easier it is to use compared to Infa, Ascl etc. The question "How do I migrate an Infa job to BODI" comes up quite often.

My impression is, the next version of DI will have 10% of the budget spent on SAP related feature, 20% on standard housekeeping tasks (performance optimizations and the such) and the rest is for new features for the pure play ETL - not SAP related.

my two cents