What’s the dif­fer­ence between ​“busi­ness ana­lyt­ics” and ​“busi­ness intel­li­gence” software?

It’s a ques­tion on the lips of many busi­ness­peo­ple these days. The cor­re­spond­ing con­fu­sion is sim­i­lar to oth­er instances of ven­dor mar­ket­ing dou­ble­s­peak and hyper­bole (see: ​“cloud computing”).

The SAP Busi­ness Ana­lyt­ics team, for its part, breaks down its SAP Busi­nes­sOb­jects prod­uct suite into six cat­e­gories. (At SAP, busi­ness intel­li­gence falls under the busi­ness ana­lyt­ics cat­e­go­ry. Got it?)

Here’s a quick explain­er on each prod­uct area.

1. Ana­lyt­ic Applications

The grow­ing line of SAP Busi­nes­sOb­jects appli­ca­tions is clas­si­fied by two cat­e­gories. The first cat­e­go­ry is bro­ken out by indus­try, such as finan­cial ser­vices, man­u­fac­tur­ing, con­sumer prod­ucts, retail and util­i­ties. Sec­ond, by line of busi­ness, which include: sup­ply chain, finance, HR, IT, and ser­vice, sales and marketing.

2. Busi­ness Intelligence

The BI cat­e­go­ry (offi­cial­ly known as: SAP Busi­nes­sOb­jects Busi­ness Intel­li­gence) encom­pass­es five dif­fer­ent prod­uct sets.

Report­ing and Analy­sis. Includes: Crys­tal Reports, Web Intel­li­gence, Pre­dic­tive Work­bench, and the SAP Busi­nes­sOb­jects Analy­sis edi­tions for Microsoft and OLAP. Dash­boards and Visu­al­iza­tion. Includes: Busi­nes­sOb­jects Dash­boards (for­mer­ly known as Xcel­sius). Data Explo­ration. Includes: SAP Busi­nes­sOb­jects Explor­er, and the ​“accel­er­at­ed ver­sion” that uses in-mem­o­ry analytics.

Mobile. Includes: SAP Busi­nes­sOb­jects Mobile.BI Plat­form. Includes: BI Plat­form prod­uct set, inte­gra­tion tools and Live Office for Microsoft prod­uct integration.

3. Enter­prise Per­for­mance Management

So how’s your com­pa­ny doing against the plan? How about the indi­vid­ual depart­ments? The SAP EPM line includes key areas such as: strat­e­gy man­age­ment; plan­ning, bud­get­ing and fore­cast­ing; prof­itabil­i­ty and cost man­age­ment; finan­cial con­sol­i­da­tion; dis­clo­sure man­age­ment; and sup­ply chain performance.

4. Enter­prise Infor­ma­tion Management

SAP’s EIM prod­uct set is wide rang­ing. The goal: to ensure good infor­ma­tion can lead to good decisions.

Data Ser­vices. This cat­e­gories include SAP Busi­nes­sOb­jects prod­ucts for (among oth­ers) data inte­gra­tion, deliv­ery, fed­er­a­tion, insight and qual­i­ty man­age­ment.Mas­ter Data Man­age­ment. Two prod­ucts here: NetWeaver Mas­ter Data Man­age­ment and Mas­ter Data Gov­er­nance. Event Pro­cess­ing. Two prod­uct cat­e­gories here, too: Busi­nes­sOb­jects Event Insight and Sybase Aleri Stream­ing Plat­form.Con­tent Man­age­ment. Three Open­Text prod­ucts aim to help com­pa­nies man­age their struc­tured and unstruc­tured con­tent. Infor­ma­tion Gov­er­nance. Just one prod­uct here: NetWeaver Infor­ma­tion Life­cy­cle Management.

5. Gov­er­nance, Risk and Compliance

The GRC cat­e­go­ry includes enter­prise GRC (risk man­age­ment, com­pli­ance, and mon­i­tor­ing), access risk man­age­ment (cen­tral­ized GRC man­age­ment), glob­al trade ser­vices (man­ag­ing world­wide com­pli­ance risks), and sus­tain­abil­i­ty per­for­mance management.

6. Data Warehousing

This cat­e­go­ry includes the HANA in-mem­o­ry com­put­ing appli­ance; enter­prise data ware­hous­es and data marts; Sybase IQ; and the NetWeaver Busi­ness Ware­house and Busi­ness Ware­house Accelerator.

Also see SAP’s ​“easy peasy” dia­gram below for how Busi­ness Ana­lyt­ics fits into a company’s IT environment.