Okay, freshly back from the SAP Financials 2008 conference in Orlando this year. It was a good time had by all, except for probably those poor WIS Pub employees who made it run so smoothly.
The highlight of the conference for me were a couple of sessions dedicated to the roadmap of BI-Netweaver & Business Objects. As I’ve written previously, SAP’s acquisitions have been a source of consternation to customers that are trying to implement functionality in the areas of Budgeting & Planning or Corpoarte Performance Management (CPM). That said, it was good to get a glimpse into the future.
Stephanie Buscemi of SAP America gave us several gems in a session called “A Comprehensive Guide to New SAP Business Objects Financial Performance Management Solutions.”
| Solution | Status |
| SEM BPS | Went into maintenance mode in 2005 |
| BI-IP | Primarily for customers having an investement in BI-IP. Goes into maintenance 2013 with extended maintenance through 2016 |
| BPC | Primary budgeting application going forward. Being rolled into the Business Objects (BOBJ) universe. |
| BOBJ-XIR2 | Maintenance mode through 2011 with premium extended maintenance through 2013 |
| BOBJ Planning (Cartesis Planning) | Maintenance mode through 2011 with premium extended maintenance through 2013 |
| BOBJ Financial Consolidations (Cartesis Finance) | “The Porsche of consolidations.” Clearly the go-forward product for consolidations. |
The word was that if you’ve got existing licenses for a product that is being phased out, that there “might” be a potential swap. Some of these products, though, will just flat out require new licensing.
While the dust appears to be settling a bit, the pricing of these products needs to be figured out if SAP expects to sell them to a large number of its customers. It is becoming more feasible to replace the SAP owned products with best-of-breed products. That is sort of restating the obvious since that is exactly what SAP is doing by purchasing best-of-breed products and inserting them into its product line-up. If SAP will be charging a premium for using SAP branded products, it’s going to need to give a compelling reason to go the SAP route versus best-of-breed.
Please leave a comment and let me know what you think the outcome will be.
Byron
Hi Byron,
I believe important to mention in respect of BPC is that it performs consolidations, statutory as well as management, as well. The choice between BPC and Cartesis will be based on geographical refrence base, complexity and volumes (and price, as always). In France for example, Cartesis is the way to go forward, but in other countries BPC will be positioned as a consolidation tool also.
Bjorn,
Thanks for the insight. In our talks with SAP, they did indeed commend the BPC consolidations module to us. That was in October/November of last year. It will be interesting to see if SAP continues to develop the BPC cons module or if they move completely to the BOBJ Cons (old Cartesis). My understanding is that SAP is rolling BPC into the Business Objects company, putting all of these CPM related modules under the same umbrella. I wish I had more detail on the strengths/weaknesses of the various platforms so I could give a better picture of that to my readers. Hopefully, I will be able to remedy that in the future.
Best regards,
Byron
Byron,
My company has trained consultants on both BPC (was involved since the start in Benelux) and Cartesis. Should you need further info, let me know.
Best regards
Bjorn
I’ve been working with large scale SAP BPC implementation projects in the UK for the last 4 years from when the product was OutlookSoft version 4.0
The software has come a long way since then and the latest release from SAP (5.1 SP2 – SP3 coming end April 08) has fixed numerous older issues and introduced even more reporting diversity into the toolbase.
SAP BPC can do consolidation although the consolidation engine can be configured in multiple ways. Someone pointed out the time dimension being linear as a disadvantage (clearly an ESSBASE user!) but to me this has actually been a advantage when using some of the modelling tools and logic which can quickly apply rules across time periods.