BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform Architecture

This section outlines the overall platform architecture, system, and service components that make up the SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence platform. The information helps administrators understand the system essentials and help to form a plan for the system deployment, management, and maintenance.

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence platform is designed for high performance across a broad spectrum of user and deployment scenarios. For example, specialized platform services handle either on-demand data access and report generation, or report scheduling based on times and events. You can offload processor intensive scheduling and processing by creating dedicated servers to host specific services. The architecture is designed to meet the needs of virtually any BI deployment, and is flexible enough to grow from several users with a single tool, to tens of thousands of users with multiple tools and interfaces.

Developers can integrate SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence platform BI into your organization's other technology systems by using web services, Java, or .NET application programming interfaces (APIs).

End users can access, create, edit, and interact with reports using specialized tools and applications that include:

• Clients installed by SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform Client Tools installation

program:

• Web Intelligence

• Business View Manager

• Report Conversion Tool

• Universe design tool

• Web Service query tool (formerly Query as a Web Service)

• Information design tool (formerly Information Designer)

• Translation Management Tool (formerly Translation Manager)

• Widgets for SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform (formerly BI Widgets)

• Clients available separately:

• SAP Crystal Reports

• SAP BusinessObjects Dashboard Design (formerly Xcelsius)

• SAP BusinessObjects Analysis (formerly Voyager)

• BI Workspaces (formerly Dashboard Builder)

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BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform Architecture

IT departments can use data and system management tools that include:

• Report Viewers

• Central Management Console (CMC)

• Central Configuration Manager (CCM)

• Repository Diagnostic Tool (RDT)

• Data Federation Administration Tool

• Upgrade management tool (formerly Import Wizard)

• Universe design tool (formerly Universe Designer)

• SAP BusinessObjects Mobile

To provide flexibility, reliability, and scalability, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence platform components can be installed on one or across many machines. You can even install two differentversions of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence platform simultaneously on the same computer, although this configuration is only recommended as part of the upgrade process or testing purposes.

Server processes can be “vertically scaled” (where one computer runs several, or all, server-side

processes) to reduce cost, or “horizontally scaled” (where server processes are distributed between two or more networked machines) to improve performance. It is also possible to run multiple, redundant, versions of the same server process on more than one machine, so that processing can continue if the primary process encounters a problem.