SAPPHIRE NOW in Orlando was packed with examples of how Big Data affects all our lives.

SAP Executive Steve Lucas was the host of an Intel-sponsored Big Data special interest group meeting at the conference. He kicked off the session by explaining that he considers himself to be an example of the human face of new data technologies. As a type 1 Diabetic, he wears a device that measures his blood sugar once a second, and communicates it to a hand-held device that he uses to constantly monitor his diet and take control of his health:

“For a diabetic, you literally are the living embodiment of data because you spend most of your spare time during your day checking and monitoring your blood sugar number.”

Rick Smolen, a former Time Life journalist and photographer, spoke at the event and during a panel the next day.

After working on various projects including the very successful “Day in the Life” series of books, Rick’s most recent book (and accompanying interactive iPad application) is called The Human Face of Big Data, and it’s full of compelling stories of how new data technologies are making a difference.

Rick explained that Marissa Meyer, now CEO of Yahoo, helped draw him to the project when she described technology as “helping the planet develop a nervous system.” In other words, by aggregating all of the sensors, searches and transactions in the world, it gives us a sense of what’s happening in the planet in real time.

In his forward to the book, Rick says:

“On the following pages, as you meet the men, women, and children whose lives are being transformed by this data revolution, I suspect you will come to the same conclusion that I have: Big Data may well turn out to be the most powerful tool set the human race has ever had to address the widespread challenges facing our species and our planet”

Rick believes that big data will change our lives – and not just in the business world. “Healthcare is at the top of the list” he explained. Today, as drug companies do clinical trials, they may find that it can help 99% of patients, but harm a small percentage, so could never get approved by the FDA. But the price of genome decoding is plummeting, holding out the promise of personalized medicine, prescriptions based on what is effective for your particular DNA. “Today, the cures exist, but they are sitting on the shelves” said Rick “today, antibiotics is one size fits all. The whole work is going to change thanks to medicine designed to treat the individual.”

Sensors will also result in new opportunities. “For example, 14 seconds before the recent massive earthquake in Japan, every bullet train and every factory came to a halt” said Rick. “Because the country had prepared a hardwired sensor system to detect the wave that comes before the violent one”.  That required a huge upfront capital investment. In silicon valley, a group of researchers realized that every modern laptop has sensors to protect their hard drives: if you drop the computer, it lifts the head off the platter to try to save the spinning disk. So they created the Quake Catcher Network, that allows crowd-sourced earthquake detection around the world. You download the free software to your computer and let it run in the background (it can be your default screensaver, for example). Then the software aggregates all the data and if one person’s laptop sensor is set off by, for example, a heavy truck going by, nothing happens, but if all the sensors in a 30 mile radius go off, then it’s an earthquake…

Sensors are also behind a new “magic carpet”: “My mother is 90 years old, and my father passed away six years ago. Six months ago, my mother fell, and then she fell another time, and the third time, nobody found her for five hours. We asked her to move in with us, but she didn’t want to. We hired people to live with her in shifts, and she hated it. Now GE and Intel are introducing products aimed at aging at home, and one of the prototypes is a carpet filled with sensors. Over time, it creates a baseline knowledge of ‘normal behavior’ – she walks on the carpet at 9:30 am, and here’s her gait – over time it can predict muscle weakness, and changes to normal patterns and tweet me to “call mom!”

Rick believes one of the biggest opportunities is making better use of previously ignored “dark data”. “For years, meteorologists have had to filter out ‘bioclutter’ from Doppler radar weather systems – the “noise” generated by flocks of birds or bats. But when bird researchers realized they had 15 years of invaluable data on migration patterns they were delighted!”

But Rick also cautioned that there will be new challenges. For example, today, data is typically owned by governments and businesses, not individuals, and there needs to be more thinking about how to make sure that powerful data is not misused.

For more fantastic examples and stories about Big Data is affecting people’s lives, visit http://bigdata.saphana.com/

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A big part of the challenge for companies looking to pour money into renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power is determining whether there is enough sustainable wind or sunlight in a particular geography to maximize investments in these technologies.

Companies looking to reap the benefits of Mother Nature’s renewable energy sources can use analytics to evaluate multiple factors, including the average amount of cloud cover, direct sunlight, and the wind energy potential that’s available to justify investments in renewable energy systems.

For instance, even in sunlight-rich regions such as the Southwest US or the Middle East, executives would want to evaluate the estimated amount of daily cloud cover since any shading that might occur on a given day could dramatically reduce the output of a solar energy system.

Because data centers consume so much energy, a growing number of organizations are exploring the potential for placing photovoltaic cells on the roofs of their data centers to help power these facilities. Electricity used by data centers worldwide rose by 56% between 2005 and 2010, according to The Data Center Journal.

For organizations exploring the potential use of solar energy systems, big data analytics can be used to evaluate a number of requirements for adoption. This includes the available roofing space that can be used, the remaining lifetime of the roofing infrastructure and how quickly it would need to be replaced, along with the pitch of the roof and the amount of shade received by the roof’s surface.

Meanwhile, recent studies suggest that the wind offers the potential to power the entire world – and then some. In fact, wind has the potential to generate more than 20 times the amount of power that the world currently consumes, according to a study by the Washington, DC-based Carnegie Institute for Science,

The potential behind wind energy has led US government officials to push to expand the development of wind farms on the Atlantic coast. Roughly 1,900 square miles of Atlantic Ocean waters are being made available for building offshore wind farms, according to US officials.

One of the strengths of offshore wind farms is that there’s nearly always a steady flow of wind coming ashore to turn the turbines. However, such investments still need to be cost-justified by investors, many of whom are incented by federal tax credits.

In addition to construction costs, developers also have to consider the costs of conducting environmental impact studies. And the biggest challenge is determining who is going to buy the power, notes Brian O’Hara, president of the North Carolina Offshore Wind Coalition.

Power contractors can use analytics to better determine the full amount of construction costs, including estimates involving overtime labor costs and weather-related construction delays, along with the likely market rate for the electricity to be generated and the amount of power that’s expected to be consumed in a particular region.

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As announced last Friday, SAP Visual Intelligence has been renamed to SAP Lumira (you can find the announcement and full FAQ here)

Why Did We Change Another Perfectly Good BI Product Name?

We know that this decision is likely to be met by some eye-rolling from our faithful customers who are still recovering from previous name changes.

The bottom line: we know that there are downsides to such a change, and despite the inevitable disruption it may cause, we feel it’s the right choice. Here are some of the key reasons that tipped the balance:

Family Ties. As we announced earlier this week, the next version of SAP Visual Intelligence (sorry, SAP Lumira) will offer tight integration with SAP’s next-generation cloud BI platform, SAP Lumira Cloud. We feel that it’s more appropriate to use a completely new name for a completely new “network of truth” approach to business intelligence and analytics (oh – and “SAP Visual Intelligence Cloud” is clunky).

Searching and Sharing. SAP Lumira is a more human-friendly yet Google-ready name. As with SAP HANA (which trips off the tongue more easily than “SAP’s new platform for real-time analytics and applications”), a distinctive name makes it easier to find relevant materials (it’s one of the reasons we took the space out of “Business Objects” many years ago). And with community becoming increasingly important, this change should ultimately make it easier to find the information you need to deploy and use the products successfully (but alas, no, this doesn’t mean that Xcelsius is coming back, even if the logic is the same.)

Destined for Greatness. Although BI has been around for a long time, we believe that analytic users are still a minority. SAP Lumira aims to change that by making it easier than ever to get powerful, self-service business intelligence into the hands of everyone. We have big plans for the product that we can’t quite talk about yet, but we believe it is destined for greatness, and it’s less painful to make the switch now than later.

SAPLumira New Features

• Enhanced data manipulation capabilities, with better merge functionality, replay manipulation steps & improved formula editor
• Extended acquisition to more data sources & support different data formats during acquisition
• Empower end users to customize charts , add conditional formatting and create simple user defined views without scripting or coding
• Annotate and share your results at a click of a button on-premise or on the cloud.

Please Give Feedback and Spread the Word

If you’re reading this, you’re probably one of the people that know and use our products, and we’re very grateful. We know that changing names is disruptive, not only for you but for the business people in your organization that use our products to get insight. We’re eager to help you make the change as smooth as possible, so please let us know what we can do to help by taking part in the discussions at the SCN area. And we’d like your help to get the word out about the changes to the rest of the world (#SAPVisi is dead! Long live #SAPLumira!).

Save a Bundle

To celebrate the change, you can take advantage a special SAPPHIRE NOW offer that slashes the regular prices by 90% – SAP Lumira Personal (for spreadsheet data) is only $9 and the full version is only $99. Hurry! The offer is only valid during SAPPHIRE NOW and ASUG 2013, May 13-May 16th, while stocks last!

To take advantage of the offer, go to SAP.com/buylumira and use the promotion code “sapphire”

Data Geek Challenge 2.0

Looking to do something with your new product? At SAPPHIRE NOW, we’re launching the next round of the Data Geek Challenge  at www.sap.com/datageek. To enter, create an interesting view of data using SAP Lumira desktop and your data or data we’ve provided and share with the SAP Data Geek (datageek@sap.com) via SAP Lumira Cloud.

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Just before the SAPPHIRE NOW conference, SAP announced the Release to Customer (RTC) of SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.1, Edge BI 4.1 and Crystal Server 2013.

What’s New in BI 4.1

BI 4.1 is one suite for all insight, one place for all information and on standard for enterprise BI. Here are the highlights of the new release – or you can skip to the end of the post to get a detailed technical presentation of the new features.

The features in this latest release include:

• Unified and highly personalized platform with improved interoperability and usability across the BI suite
• Powerful visualizations that empower end users with industry focused visualizations and spatial analytics
• Big Data ready with support for Amazon Elastic MapReduce and Hadoop Hive. Improved access to Oracle’s Exadata, OLAP and Essbase. BI 4.1 also includes enhanced workflow capabilities in conjunction with SAP HANA and BW
• Professional grade BI platform for any size business, any type of deployment and for any role across the organization

BI 4.1 includes features for all five areas of SAP BI innovation

One Suite for All Insight

One Place for All Information

One Standard for Enterprise BI

Three key types of information access: self-service, dashboards and apps, and reporting

New Self-Service Features

New Dashboarding Features

New Reporting Features

New Platform Features

What’s different about this release?

Summary of Key Messages for Business Objects 4.1

One strategy for enterprise BI: one suite for all insight, one place for all information, one standard for enterprise BI.

One Suite For All Insight

Unified and highly personalized

• Improved interoperability and usability across the BI suite
• Deliver engaging information to users when and where they need it
• Create custom experiences with embedded analytic extensions

Powerful visualizations

• Monitor your business with specialized charting and geospatial analytics
• Empower end users with industry focused visualizations and spatial analytics
• Detect outliers and discover areas to optimize your business

Faster more accurate decisions

• Create and consume BI content from any mobile device
• Empower teams to deliver collaborative decisions
• Simplified deployment to accelerate time to value

One Place For All Information

Big data ready

• Support for Amazon Elastic MapReduce and Hadoop Hive
• Improved access to Oracle Exadata, Oracle OLAP and Oracle Essbase
• Enhanced workflow capabilities in conjunction with SAP HANA and BW

Scale and power

• Immediate response time regardless of data volume
• Improved usability to build pervasive BI applications
• Integrate with SAP monitoring, lifecycle management, search, and user management

Speed to deliver

• Enhanced design experience with new creation wizard and integrated data federation
• Improved Web Intelligence report design performance against BW
• Automated universe deployment and lifecycle management

One Standard For Enterprise BI

Professional grade BI platform

• For any size business, small to large
• For any type of deployment, on-premise or on-demand
• For anyone across the organization, individuals, teams, or department

Quality focused

• Increased efficiency to enhance decision making capability and productivity
• Non-disruptive production delivery and information governance across the organization
• Simplified architecture for increased IT responsiveness

Superior breadth of ecosystem

• Open and agnostic suite of products that can leverage existing BI investments
• Supported by global best practices for enhanced adoption
• Enable speedy deployment with shortened time to value

Key Links

• Getting Started with SAP BusinessObjects BI Solutions
• BI4 Upgrade Resources
• How to Select the Right BI Tool for Your Environment
• Sizing and Deploying SAP BusinessObjects BI4
• eLearning product tutorials
• Road Maps on SAP Service Marketplace
• SAP’s Release Strategy for Major Releases of SAP BusinessObjects BI

Full, Detailed Technical Feature Documentation/Presentation

Here’s the official feature-level what’s new manual for BusinessObjects 4.1, and a presentation by Ty Miller, delivered at the ASUG2013 / SAPPHIRENOW Conference

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Perhaps the most visible evidence of the competitive advantage that can be fueled by data analysis is LeBron James’ performance in the NBA playoffs this year and last, compared to previous lackluster post-season play by the Miami Heat superstar.

But King James’ less-than-stellar performance on the basketball court happened before he took a hard look at the analytics behind his play, notes Michael Schrage, a research fellow at MIT Sloan School’s Center for Digital Business, in a post in Harvard Business Review.

“Nothing makes serious competitors more open to analytics than losing,” the HBR article notes. “A basketball genius frustrated with his professional failings decided he wasn’t as good or as smart as he needed to be. James took a good hard look at the analytics … then he hired retired NBA legend [Hakeem] Olajuwon … to help remedy the analytically undeniable flaws and shortcomings of his game. [James] explicitly linked analytics to his personal [and] professional transformation.”

But in the world of sports, analytics are playing an even more critical role than helping players improve weaknesses: increasingly predictive analytics are being used to predict future performance. So, no matter how well a player performs in this year’s playoffs, decisions for next year will be made by predicting future results.

That’s according to another HBR post by Schrage, who posits the same approach can be used by Procter & Gamble or other companies to predict which marketing executive will come up with the best idea next quarter or which sales team will make its sales goals next year.

“Future potential matters (much) more than past performance,” according to Schrage. “That’s the new quantitative consensus reshaping professional sports worldwide. After looking hard at the numbers and algorithms, the smartest — and richest — general managers and franchises have made up their collective minds: They’re not paying a premium for yesterday.”

This next-generation “Moneyball” is more commonly being used to predict – taking into factors like age – which players are about to peak and which have past their prime.

“If you’re running Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Google, Exxon Mobil, or Ford, you have comparable concerns about making sure you’re getting the best possible returns from your talent and human capital investments,” according to Schrage.

“You should be concerned about the aging curves of your marketing people; you should want to know if your tech support folks will deliver better outcomes tomorrow than today; you should be predicting which sales teams will procure the most lucrative contracts with the minimum risks,” he adds. “Think of it as Six Sigma predictive analytics for talent.”

Still, it’s difficult to measure the role that personal loyalty plays in inspiring extra effort that leads to better results, the post notes.

“The classic response, of course, is to insist that, ultimately, these decisions come down to human judgments rather than computational dictatorships,” the post concludes. “But that’s exactly why acknowledging the current trend is so important: The leaderships of the richest and (ostensibly) best-managed franchises in sports have effectively declared that the costs of preserving past values are too high relative to the potential for tomorrow’s performance.”

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Quality issues and cost pressures are leading telecommunications carriers to ramp up their investments in analytics tools that can be used to help them improve the customer experience, lower churn, and identify opportunities for improving operational efficiencies, according to a newly-released study from Accenture.

Executives across 30 communications and media companies say they plan to invest in network analytic tools to improve network planning, enhance the quality of service, and improve the customer experience, according to the survey.

Carriers commonly use network analytics tools to analyze network data alarms, performance measures, trouble tickets, and customer churn due to dropped calls and other network performance and reliability issues.

Seventy-seven percent of the respondents say that managing the quality of services is the biggest challenge for telecom operators, particularly in a shared network environment. The use of analytics software can help carriers better prepare for and respond to these challenges in a number of ways.

As consumer demand for mobile data continues to surge, carriers will increasingly rely on big data analytics to determine gaps in network performance and capacity.

However, even though carriers are investing heavily in 4G LTE (long-term evolution) communication services and radio network upgrades, operators may not be planning sufficient investments in backhaul to meet consumer demand over the next five years, according to a study conducted by Tellabs.

Global mobile data traffic has increased 13 times in the past five years and it’s anticipated to grow five or six times more by 2017, according to the study, which also predicts a $9.2 billion global backhaul funding gap with a 16 petabyte shortfall in backhaul capacity by 2017.

Individual carriers and those that are partnered in a shared network environment can use analytics to evaluate the likely growth in data traffic for specific customer segments and geographic areas. Carriers can then use that information to craft strategies for building out network capacity in different locations.

Carriers can also use analytics to help create virtual network models by combining network technology configuration and topology with the behavior of network elements to more accurately predict utilization for dimensioning and to predict resource shortages, notes GSMA, an organization that represents the interests of mobile operators worldwide.

As carriers build out network capacity, they can also use analytics to identify new business opportunities and services they can offer consumers and subscribers.

For instance, in a report that focuses on opportunities for mobile operators to deliver “smart” mobile services, Accenture rattles off a number of different applications and services carriers can develop in cities around the world including:

• Mobile health remote monitoring solutions that can be used by chronically ill patients to optimize home medical visits around specific medical needs
• Smart traffic control through the use of embedded sensors in roadway equipment that can be used to proactively reroute traffic to avoid congestion and direct traffic to underutilized roads
• In-vehicle telematics applications that can be used to help stoke eVehicle adoption by alerting drivers to nearby charging stations, wait times and availability

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