SAP upgrades its BI tools to 4.0 release

"This release is huge," said Dave Weisbeck, senior vice president of BI and EIM solution management. "Every single tool has had some major upgrades. There's not a single place we haven't touched."

One of my clients I worked with in the past had 2 different versions of their BusinessObjects Universes, with 2 different versions of client and server toolsets running. This was due to the poor migration story BO had, with reports and client tools losing functionality and formatting, a parallel-server migration, and an angry user base (and double the administration) as a result. Hopefully this doesn't happen with the new SAP 4.0 BI tools and there is a clear upgrade path and roadmap.

SAP purchased Sybase last year. Sybase created the original Microsoft SQL product, and MS branched off with their own codebase in SQL 7, further in SQL 2000.  Interesting how many of the BI vendors with a long history (Cognos, Sybase) are being consolidated into the mega software conglomerates.

There may be more than five computers in the world, however it's slowly looking like there's only going to be 5 enterprise BI companies soon..

• IBM
• Oracle
• Microsoft
• SAP
• The little guys