SAP has launched the 4.0 releases of its BI (business intelligence) and EIM (enterprise information management) solutions from its BusinessObjects portfolio.

With these products, the company wants to address the growing needs of enterprises which want to enable a mobile workforce and also keep an eye on social media.

“Companies want to find out whether people are saying good things or bad things about them, so social analytics is very important for them today,” said Mr Simon Dale, senior VP - Asia Pacific Japan, SAP Asia Pte Ltd.

The challenge, he said, was that companies were traditionally used to dealing with structured data in databases, while the information found on social networks is typically unstructured.

“The world of unstructured information is exploding faster than the database world.”

One of the goals for SAP was to help businesses get an understanding of the data that they are managing from different perspectives.

“The way a CFO views the financial results will be different from how the head of sales will look at the same information,” pointed out Mr Dale.

He also highlighted the importance of mobility in the enterprise and said that at SAP itself, people use over 17,000 BlackBerrys and over 2,500 iPads to access information.

“We are trying to change the way people look at and analyse data,” he said.

Security is a big issue for mobile devices, which are liable to get stolen or lost.

In such cases, Mr Dale said that SAP's solutions can be used to remove data on devices such as iPhones, iPads, BlackBerrys and other phones.

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