SAP has embedded Google’s mapping APIs – the same ones from Google Maps and Google Earth — within BusinessObjects, which allows companies lay their data over maps for a more visual interpretation of the data with a kind of geospatial dashboard. The idea is not a new one, however.  “Mash-ups” have been around in the consumer space for years, just not with enterprise applications. Not only are they looking at their own data, but companies can also upload their own maps as well.

As SAP put it, customers can now understand the “where” of their information, as well as global, regional, and local trends affecting their businesses.

That means that a cell phone service provider could lay reams of user call data over a map of the company’s cell phone towers and zones of service, determining usage patterns and looking at where calls were getting dropped. That might help them determine whether it’s a matter of not having a strong enough signal, or whether a cell phone tower is simply taxed beyond capacity.

Additionally, given that home foreclosures happen in some neighborhoods more than others – and can spread like a bad rash – banks can look at the data to help stem their losses, according to Jonathan Becher, executive vice president of marketing at SAP.  They might drop interest rates in those areas most likely to be hit next, losing a bit of money in the short term, but saving money overall by keeping paying customers in their homes.

While the Google APIs will be available as a part of SAP BusinessObjects BI/EIM 4.1 later this year, it will also become part of Sales OnDemand in the near future, Becher said. Since the application is mobile-friendly, sales reps with 10 locations to visit in an area could look at a map on a tablet combining sales data and the locations of the accounts, in order to help the rep prioritize which locations to visit.

And, since the application is married to BusinessObjects, maps can be used in conjunction with real-time data being processed by SAP HANA and in-memory applications.

SAP’s relationship with Google has in the past yielded things like Google making SAP StreamWork available in their marketplace.  Not a huge deal.  To me, this seems like something so beneficial to companies that it begs the question: why didn’t they think of this before?

McAffee (no relation to the security folks) showed an illustration indicating what Red Sox legend Ted Williams thought his lifetime batting average would be if he had only seen pitches to specific areas in the strike zone over the duration of his career.

As you can imagine, Williams had pegged points right in the sweetest parts of the strike zone at .400, while guesstimating that only getting pitches to the farther reaches of the strike zone might have meant lifetime averages in the .280 range.

Drawing upon a more European example, Nannetti spoke about how the Arsenal professional football (soccer) team in England had determined that it was struggling because one of its players was playing a tad too far forward. Passes to the player were taking a fraction longer to get to him, making it easier for opponents to intercept the ball. That changed once the player began hanging back more.

“Overnight, the performance of the team picked up again,” Nannetti said.

What are the lessons here?

As McAfee noted, Williams was purely guessing when asked to come up with the illustration. Detailed data showing where in the strike zone pitches had actually landed – something that any baseball fan knows is available today – just wasn’t available then. Businesses, he said, can only take advantage of the full potential of business analytics to prove or disprove assumptions about why they are succeeding – or failing, as well as shed new light on specific problems. Seattle Mariners pitcher Felix Hernandez, for example, improved his performance once he and others on the Mariner’s staff saw data indicating that he was relying predominantly on fastballs early in his games – and batters knew it. Using a wider range of pitches showed near immediate results, he said, helping Hernandez winning last year’s Cy Young pitching award.

While none of these examples are specific to SAP, there are some pretty compelling parallels about the need for accurate, reliable data in sports, as well as in business. As Nannetti said, subtle changes in strategy can make a big difference in sports as well as in business.

“If you can imagine in our own business working environment, being able to understand and analyze the interaction with our customers to that level of detail,” Nannetti said, “and tune our sales peoples’ behavior, our front office behavior, to be able to respond in such a precise way. [What an] impact that might have on our performance.”

Why would SAP hold a big press conference, call in the big guns in Bill McDermott and introduce a bunch of new vertical applications that didn’t really leverage (at least yet) any of the technology principals SAP espoused at Sapphire — on-demand, in-memory and mobile?

To be fair, SAP’s working with HP to put these applications in the cloud, and that likely means that they will in some way leverage HANA — the in-memory appliance that SAP’s working on with HP. Plus, SAP said they would support mobile in the second half of 2011.

So I posed my question to a couple of my sharpest SAP shop pals. I don’t cover business analytics all that often. I know people want business analytics. But is there some huge demand for these that I haven’t caught on to that’d make SAP push them out now?

What I got was an interesting history lesson.

For 10 years or so, SAP has sold industry-specific software as it relates to ERP. You’re familiar with it — Apparel and Footwear, Public Sector, Utilities, etc. This is meant to accommodate potential customers whose business processes weren’t covered by the R/3 functionality, one of my pals said.

Physically, these are add-ons to standard R/3/ECC architecture. Some of them extend standard tables and programs, and some are ‘non-modifying’, completely in their own namespace. But when it comes to BI and BW content, these customers are sometimes left behind, because that content is based on the standard R/3 scenarios. Historically, they were not able to run ETL or report on data that’s in the vertical add-ons without custom development. SAP has put a lot of the vertical content in BW, but the BOBJ stuff is still pretty new.

So these new vertical apps present very appealing SAP BusinessObjects bait for those customers that run those “Industry Solutions”, like AFS or the Utilities. It allows those apps to access content in that industry-specific software without a whole bunch of custom development.

It must be why the SDN-type folks at that press conference kept asking the question over and over again — how much custom development is involved in this? They were schooled in their history lessons.

No doubt business analytics is the hot sell right now. Surveys across our TechTarget sites reveal it is a top IT initiative for customers in 2011.

I’ll return to a theme I’ve repeated a lot on this blog — is it cheaper to keep an existing customer or go out and get a new one? SAP of course wants to sell BOBJ into the existing customer base.

And of course, many customers don’t want to buy something that requires a bunch of custom-development. Perhaps this is a case where the BOBJ content was custom-developed in-house for certain customers to meet specific business requirements, and then readied to be packaged and sold, my pal said.

Savvy, SAP.

But how many of the verticals can they actually deliver this type of functionality for? We shall see.