SAP Africa shows how to mobilise business intelligence for competitive advantage

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From a young age, children now use search engines to quickly access information and this is prevalent not only in the private sphere but in all aspects of the business world. 

The information society’s desire and demand for immediate access to information has become the driving force behind Mobility Business Intelligence (BI) as forward-looking organisations insist that their business intelligence needs are met easily and instantaneously in real-time.

With tight competition among BI vendors across the globe, customers are now look for differentiation in tangible product value and innovation.

In the recently released 2013 Edition of Howard Dresner's Mobile Business Intelligence Market Study, SAP BusinessObjects Mobile scored as the ‘Clear market leader in delivering high value Mobile Business Intelligence Product features and Innovation”, ahead of competitors like IBM and Oracle.

The report reveals that SAP clearly delivers the most comprehensive Mobile BI solution on the market. These findings were echoed by other top BI analysts that include Forrester, Gartner and Ventana Research, confirming SAP’s strong presence in a highly competitive market.

Merlin Knott, SAP Africa’s Director of Business Analytics, said: “The momentum around mobile analytics is increasing exponentially as it has proven to be a critical element to transforming businesses. It is also completely aligned with the current hype surrounding cloud computing, big data and BYOD (bring your own device).

“A lot of people use a smartphone or tablet in their personal lives and then expect to do the same at work, we are the instant gratification generation.”

During the course of their day-to-day activities, many companies collate data from a wide range of different corporate divisions and departments as well as external sources. The question is what can we done with this data and how up-to-date is it?

Using the SAP Mobile BI solution coupled with our real time in memory data architecture organisations can give their business users the ability to make the right snap decisions powered by reliable information.

“Imagine being able to ‘Google’ the contents of your local supermarket before you get to the store, then based on your search the store offering you the next best product that will be pre-packed and waiting for you at a drive through window,” said Knott.

The superior insights that businesses are able to gain though the intelligence will help them make operational and strategic decisions more effectively and more quickly, enable them to streamline their processes, reduce costs and ultimately generate additional business value to any end user of the information, internal or external.

SAP Africa provides a mobile-first approach to BI by way of its solutions for Android, iOS and Windows 8. These solutions help drive decision-making by delivering the information that businesses require anytime, anywhere, and on any device without the information consumer ever having to understand the complexity behind the scenes.

According to Knott, African companies are becoming increasingly empowered and see the necessity to provide critical business intelligence information to the fingertips of every person, thereby promoting more data-driven, consumer-centric businesses.

So, it’s not a surprise that these organisations are seeking technology strategies like mobile analytics to gather real value out of big data and to leverage more meaningful insights across their organisations.

The full Howard Dresner study can be found here