I recently had the chance to sit down with Shawn Blevins who presented for SAP BusinessObjects at the ITA BI Roundtable in September, the BI Tool Vendor Grudge Match. We talked about a few things outside of what was presented and I wanted to share some excerpts with you. For more of the interview as well as my commentary, visit PracticalBusinessIntelligence.com.

Jeff: Tell me a little about yourself/your background.

Shawn: I started out by having my own consulting company called IntelliThought in Tennessee. We had a tremendous SQL install for Eastmen Chemical and moved them off of AIX over to DB2. From there, I went over to Accenture for about 18 months but then Microsoft came calling. I was at Microsoft for almost five years as a SQL Server technology specialist when I started. I left to go over to the management side and started the solutions specialist community which was designed to build solutions using SQL Server as well as the other Microsoft products. A lot of BI solutions, a lot of business decision support systems. Then I went to Oracle and ran the application server sales group. It was BI solution building work under global sale services. I talk a lot about build-based BI systems, because I think that's the mindset of the world when you've grown up with Microsoft and Oracle.

When I came to SAP, I began working on the BusinessObjects acquisition. We [at SAP] realized they were a vendor that truly had an end-to-end, productized, standardized platform that matched SAP's productized ERP solution. It became evident to us what we needed to do--to get out of the BI tool business and buy someone that could provide full top-to-bottom standardization, metadata, and master data ... to have them consume the key metrics out of our ERP platform and make them available to our customers. We're not trying to buy additional vendors. We believe in a complementary partner approach. We made the announcement so we weren't going to disrupt BusinessObjects or force any SAP technology in there.

So, I've come full circle from building it to making money on building it as a consultant to selling the vision "if you buy these tools, learn them, and build a lot of complex pieces, then eventually you'll have a data warehouse" to where I'm at now. I've evolved to a focus on business execution instead of having to wait for execution while you go down into the IT/technical weeds and build a bunch of software. Using a platform like BusinessObjects, you can depend on a robust, full-featured reporting solution delivered by a company that sells the solution and its configuration and discussion of what's the best way to implement the solution, rather than a toolbox you have to invest a bunch of additional work into.

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Introduction
Q: Tell me a little about yourself/your background.
Q: What is the number-one thing companies should consider
before launching a BI initiative?
Q: What is the most common mistake you encounter in a company's thinking when approaching BI?
Q: What's the big thing to look out for in the BI space in the
next 5 years?
Q: Would you like to make any kind of closing statement?

Introduction (Jeff Block):
Video 1 | Video 2  | Presentation

Microsoft (Daniel Vandercar):

Actionable guidance in turning data into your most valuable asset.