Primary trends in the analytics market (By IDC)that are driving the technical requirements of software platforms to support decision making include:

Growth in the number of end users:
# Internal access to business intelligence data is being expanded beyond the analyst/power user community to include all knowledge workers.
# Externally, IDC research shows that already 44% of large companies provide business intelligence reports to external users, such as suppliers, customer, partners, and other stakeholders.
Growth in data volumes:
# Thirty percent of companies with $500 million or more in revenue expect their data warehouses to growth at least 100% over the next three years.
# Another recent IDC survey showed that 30% of organizations use intraday or continuous data feeds for their business analytics solutions, suggesting that refresh rates for data warehouses and marts are increasing.
Shorter decision cycles requiring more flexibility:
# Decision-making flexibility comes from the ability to perform continuous "what-if" analytics and ongoing scenario planning. It is not enough to just deliver information faster to decision makers in the form of reports, dashboards, or alerts. Just as important is support for evaluating decision alternatives.
# To support these decision-making tasks, IT infrastructure must be able to support rapid prototyping and more flexible ad hoc querying. Traditional data warehousing and OLAP platforms with their aggregations and materialized views have been too rigid to provide such support.

At Sapphire O6 , SAP's BIA (Business Intelligence accelerator) was highlighted in quite of few of the presentations, the BI accelerator is primarily a highly scalable analytic server that processes queries initiated by users of SAP NetWeaver BI. Its uniqueness and the features that make BI accelerator highly scalable is that it presents itself like an appliance because it combines in one package software and hardware, basically it uses SAP's TREX search technology in
conjunction with blade server architecture provided by its hardware partners (HP / IBM /INTEL).

Quotes:

• Novardis. -Efficient ad hoc reporting and analysis without anticipating querying behaviors."
• Coke. -...90% increase of reporting performance on 60 million rows... 30 seconds down to 3 seconds."
• BP. -...tens of millions of customer transactions a day across 100 countries... faster decisions that increase revenue opportunities..."

Although specific technologies employed by SAP in BI accelerator, such as search indexes, column-based (or vertically inverted) data structures, and blade server architecture, are not new, SAP has brought them all together into a cohesive solution that has the potential to make a significant impact on the business analytics market.In the highly competitive market for business analytics, it is the end users who will benefit from SAP raising the bar with its new BI accelerator solution.

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Prashanth Rai