Google and SAP Team-Up to Help You Visualize Big Data

SAP announced today that several of its enterprise products will soon gain new features for visualizing location data from Google Maps. SAP BusinessObjects Explorer and Streamwork were specifically mentioned. SAP expects these features to be available in both on-premise and hosted versions of its applications.

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Some of the potential applications, according to SAP’s announcement, include:

• A telecom operator will be able to use Google Earth and SAP BusinessObjects Explorer software to perform dropped-call analysis and pinpoint the geo-coordinates of faulty towers.
• A state department of revenue will be able to overlay household tax information on a map of the state and group it at the county level to track the highest and lowest tax bases.
• A mortgage bank will be able to perform risk assessment of its mortgage portfolio by overlaying foreclosure and default data with the location of loans on Google Maps.
• With SAP StreamWork, a team of customer support representatives in a consumer packaged goods company will be able to collaborate and pinpoint the location of consumer complaints within specific geographies and make a decision regarding how to address and prioritize resolution.
• A theme park operator will be able to use the Google Maps API Premier and get real-time traffic information on attractions with SAP® BusinessObjects solutions to send rerouting messages to customers in order to improve satisfaction rates.
• U.S. census data can be overlaid on a Google map of the country, grouped by state and drilled down on at the county level.

Google has recently been criticized for shutting down and/or not providing commercial support for a number of its APIs, which may be providing Microsoft an opening to push its own data-as-a-service solutions. Google Maps seems to remain central to Google however and is in direct competition with Microsoft’s Bing Maps. A number of SAP’s products compete with the Microsoft Dynamics line, so a partnership with Google makes sense.

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