SAP Business User software

SAP Business User is a term used by SAP as its 4th main product group along existing ones: NetWeaver, Business Suite, Business ByDesign. It was introduced around year 2007 as next generation set of applications gained by BOBJ acquisition. It refers to category software which covers needs of specific organization users out of ERP systems.

It has following categories:

1. EPM - Enterprise Performance Management: Business Planning Consolidation (BPC); Strategy Management; Profitability and Cost Management

2. GRC - Government, Risk and Compliance:  Risk Management; Process Control; Environment Health and Safety; Access Control; Global Trade Services

3. IDD - Information Discovery and Delivery: Reporting Dashboarding and Visualization; Advance Analytics; Query, Reporting and Analyses; Search and Navigation

4. IM - Information/Data Management: Data Integration; Master Data Management; Data Quality Management; Metadata Management

SAP sees huge potential out of this Business User software. They expects to get more then 50% of revenue. If you compare how much they get from ERP it is huge number.

Overview of particular products comprised in SAP Business User Stack:

1. EPM: BOBJ Cartesis, SAP BPC NW based, SAP BPC Microsoft based (OutlookSoft),

2. GRC: SAP GRC

3. IDD: Crystal Reports, WebI, Pioneer/Voyager, Xcelsius, Explorer

4. IM: Data Integrator, Dat Services, Metadata Manager, SAP MDM, Data Insight

SAP Business User technical Environment:

In 2010 BWA will be released in an Open Environment called BOA – BusinessObjects Accelerated. This will allow BWA which is in-memory data warehouse to host SAP and non SAP data with access via Explorer. Moreover SAP is continuing with partnering some other database vendors in order bring more data into SAP BW platform. Those vendors includes: IBM with DB2 database, HP with tier NeoView, Microsoft with its SQL Server and Sharepoint plus Duet as joint product with SAP and Teradata. Further there are more companies cooperating in BWA in some ways: Dell and Cisco. There is an anticipation that SAP from long term perspective will fade out a need for traditional data warehousing platform by such an in-memory platform.

See all documentation related to Business User at help.sap.com.