BPS / IP / Outlook soft Roadmap

[Former Member]

hello Every body,

Is someone knows the roadmap for all those products ??

End of BPS maintenance, Outlook soft availability in SAP , futur of IP in this contexte ??

no tool is available to migrate BPS custo into IP, I would like to be sure we are not wasting customer money on IP if everything has to move again to a new technology soon ( at least before BPS end of maintenance !)

many thanks

JL

[Former Member]

Hi Jean Louis,

In addition to Prakash's blog he mentioned already, I posted another <a href="/people/ryan.leask/blog/2007/09/03/what-is-cpm-and-what-is-happening-with-sem-and-bi-integrated-planning today that might help answer some of your questions. As i state in the blog, you are totally fine investing in IP - it is not a waste.

Hope this helps.

Regards,

Ryan

[Former Member]

Ryan, I've read your blog and closely followed the development of BI-IP. It strikes me that at this stage a company who wants to do top-down planning should not use BI-IP as it isn't quite there yet. Would you agree with this statement?

[Former Member]

I guess I will take your lack of a response as an acknowledgement of my assessment.

What is particularly troublesome about top-down planning in IP is the inability to prevent the creation of the cartesian product of all characteristics included in a query. Certainly you can use a characteristic relationship but this does not prevent the cartesian for any values of '#'. Oh, you can set the 'excl. #' flag on that but this then causes basic copy functions to fail (thereby preventing the ability to easily maintain multiple versions of a plan).

One would think that this would be a rather common (and almost necessary) set of requirements for top-down planning. So it would seem that IP is not "battle-tested" and, therefore, should not be used for top-down planning.

[Former Member]

Hi,

Jean-Louis, hope you're doing well!

Additionally to the blog mentioned by our friend Prakash, some elements to answer your question:

1. BI IP is the current offering in the Netweaver stack, development teams are working on it, there is no change for the development of this product.

2. There is clearly a value proposition around BI IP for customer requiring a strong BI Integration, highly centralized planning processes and multiple locations deployment.

3. The converged offering between BI IP and BPC will try to secure the investment in both technologies starting with the 8.0 release. More details to come on that topic.

The big deal around this discussion is to find out the best value proposition around SAP BPC and BI IP for each customer case. But there is space for both!

Hope this helps!

Cheers

JH

[Former Member]

Future development and feature enhancement for planing will be around IP.

There are some work around to reuse the BPS config. but like you said, there is tremendous amount of re work and re configurations.

The prudent thing to do is to keep all the current development in IP.

Ravi Thothadri

[Former Member]

Hi ,

SAP is working on Integrating IP and Outlooksoft. IP fame work will continue to be intact but would be added up with Outlooksoft's CPM face as additional interface.

SAP is promising Q1 2008 as the new IP+Outlooksoft relase.

Keep fingers crossed to see a better nice product.

Cheers

Raja

[Former Member]

Hey Raja,

Glad you're interested in this.

I've written a blog that looks at some of the uses of BI-IP and SAP BPC (Outlooksoft).

Check it out here:

/people/prakash.darji/blog/2007/07/25/sap-business-planning-consolidations-outlooksoft-vs-bi-integrated-planning

Additionally, Ryan Leask will be writing a blog soon about more details for our Roadmap, so stay tuned.

Cheers,

Prakash

[Former Member]

hi prakash

can we have direct extractors from R/3 to BPC.

If yes, then can we have reporting and planning in BPC by eliminating BI. Instead of purchasing BI, Customer Can purchase directly BPC and get both reporting, planning & consolidation at one shot..

srin

[Former Member]

Hey Srinath,

Scott Cairncross in the CPM RIG has written this for customers and they are using this. I believe he will release this solution in a how-to guide shortly. Then customers can use the Microsoft version of BPC 7.0 if they aren't interested in the capabilities provided by NetWeaver BI. There will be a version of BPC 7.0 that will natively reside on BI and will be able to use NW BI native capabilities as well.

Cheers,

Prakash