In a bid to beef up its Business All-in-One ERP product for mid-sized companies, enterprise software giant SAP today announced a plan to offer pre-configured business intelligence functionality from its SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI series as part of All-in-One.
SAP also announced plans to provide its integration partners with SAP Business Objects data migration tools to help mitigate the risks and costs associated with transferring data from other enterprise systems into All-in-One.
With the addition of Business Objects functionality as well as the data migration tools, SAP hopes to expand All-in-One “from a pure ERP solution to a full business offering” for mid-sized companies, the company said in today’s announcement.
The Business Objects functionality will add pre-built reports and dashboards to All-in-One, in order to help users keep track of operational data from disparate reporting tools and applications, and identify trends and variances, SAP said. In addition, users of the integrated product will be able to perform ad hoc query and analysis based on up-to-date performance data, the company said.
The BI functionality will be available with All-in-One later this year, from both SAP and its channel partners. The company plans an initial rollout of the integrated product in the United States, Germany, and Brazil.
In addition, SAP will make available Business Objects data migration tools to its integration partners and VARs with an eye toward speeding implementation of the integrated product, the company said.
In February 2008, SAP announced an All-in-One “fast start” program — consisting of online configuration tools, pre-defined industry-specific processes, and an online cost-estimating tool — meant to make the ERP package easier and quicker to deploy. The tool announced today will cover “the full cycle of data migration needs, from extracting, mapping, validation, loading, and reconciling data” across an organization, SAP said, in addition to addressing the risk of project delays and streamlining the time and resources required for a data migration process.
The migration tool will be offered in conjunction with a “best practices” package containing pre-configured processes common to many companies, SAP said, as well as pre-configured content for the professional services, discrete and process manufacturing, consumer products, and wholesale industries.
The All-in-One data migration tools are slated for availability to partners later this year, initially in Germany and the United States.
In a related announcement, SAP said it will collaborate with Intel to optimize deployment of SAP’s Business One applications for small companies using systems that run on Intel’s Xeon processor. The collaboration calls for the two companies to provide hardware to SAP channel partners that offer industry-specific, pre-packaged software bundles based on the Business One platform.