Research has pointed to pent-up demand for solution alternatives that access the valuable data that has been cleansed, aggregated, and stored in SAP BW which is a huge after-market. The 2002-03 recent META Group survey of 'SAP BW best practices' at Global 2000 enterprises has identified a continuing need for more robust reporting and confirms that SAP BW is the largest install base of any full spectrum data warehouse product in the world with over 5,500 installations in less than 3 years.

In the present economic scenario companies and businesses operate at full efficiency with reduced staff. Business needs have demanded enhanced services from the IT departments in providing timely, accurate data from multiple sources to a broad set of users throughout the enterprise. 

Towards this need, Actuate Corporation has announced the certification of Actuate 7 for use with SAP Business Information Warehouse 3.0 (SAP BW) via the OLAP BAPI interface (BW-OBI). OLAP BAPIs provide an industry-standard method for accessing SAP BW data via third-party front-end presentation tools and enable connecting the SAP BW server to a wide range of applications with varying OLAP architectures. The Actuate 7's certification for BW-OBI and its overall integration with SAP BW makes it possible for enterprises to extend their existing SAP solution-based platform by allowing a broader set of users to access valuable SAP information said Rich Guth, senior director of solutions marketing at Actuate.

This allows business users to utilize the full potential of the mySAP Business Suite when executing ad hoc queries, creating server-managed web reports or viewing data from portal applications.Actuate also offers Business Intelligence solutions that combine data from multiple SAP and non-SAP sources thus increasing employee productivity, improving customer relationships and improving the flow of information. The Actuate self-service can query current sales data, create interactive reports within minutes, or view real-time business performance dashboards based on SAP and non-SAP solution data allowing the IT departments to maintain control over data integrity, security and system performance through the use of Actuate's Information Object Designer. 

The Actuate integration with SAP solutions has been based on SAP integration technologies Actuate's GUIs allow intuitive access to all SAP solution-based data across all functional applications. Actuate 7 gives users access to all data, whether it is standard SAP solution data or a heavily modified version with specific custom tables, which can be combined with data from non-SAP systems. Actuate 7 enables IT managers to more easily create reports, which reduces time-to-market and associated development costs. 

This solution has ensured that IT departments are off-loaded from the daily requests to develop custom, one-off reports containing SAP solution data and the Actuate Information Platform puts the power directly in the hands of the users through self-service access to information required.