“What we’ve done here is brought together best practices, industry, and line-of-business content with our BI solutions, Sybase IQ and data integration into a complete package, at a very compelling price point, so that customers have everything they need to start to get going with analytics, and do so in a way that it’s a high performance solution,” SAP said in a statement.

ZDNet’s Rachel King gets to the packages’ nexus of analytics and big data:

Specifically, that means accessing and analyzing transactional data across enterprise systems and the web, including social networks, to get a better grasp in real-time about what consumers are thinking about products and brands.

SAP asserted that the infusion of analytics technologies will enable business of all sizes to be able to manage big data with advanced business intelligence capabilities for solving specific business problems with this consumption model.

SAP also boasted about the bundles’ discount price, noting that for just 20% more than the price of BusinessObjects alone, customers get the rest of the software included.

Jayne Landry, a vice president of solution marketing at SAP charged with overseeing the new products, said including best-practice content tailored for key industries and lines of business with database and integration software will help companies deploy the applications in a faster, more comprehensive way.

“What we’ve been hearing from IT is ‘we know about the tools, but we don’t know about the use cases.’  And the line-of-business users are saying ‘we know we want to take advantage of analytics, but we’re not sure about what’s possible,’” Landry said.

“By developing this solution, and focusing on delivering those use cases and content, it enables line of business and IT to come together and have a conversation about what’s possible, and then rapidly put that into action.”

The four packages are:

Is a relational database management system just a glorified storage facility?

That was what SAP CTO Vishal Sikka implied when he sat down at SAP TechEd 2009 with two editors from SearchSAP.com to discuss a range of trends. He said, “You don’t need a relational database management system for analytics applications,” pointing to BusinessObjects Explorer and its use of the NetWeaver Business Warehouse Accelerator as an example.

Sikka is the first CTO in the history of SAP (prior to that, Hasso Plattner held that role unofficially) and at TechEd he made a good impression on SAP Mentor Jon Reed, who said of Sikka in his post-TechEd blog What I liked (and didn’t like about SAP TechEd2009):

“I welcome his honesty regarding SAP’s product rollouts. Sikka did not try to blur the lines to give an appearance that ByD is in general release. When asked, he accurately described ByD as in “limited release” in several countries.”

Reed went on to write in his blog that the most compelling things SAP has to offer are either easier to do, or only possible to do, on ERP 6.0/NetWeaver 7.x. The use of the NetWeaver Business Warehouse Accelerator for in-memory database capabilities is one example. Reed writes that a 4.x ERP customer can run a separate BW 7.0 server to access BWA, but they must upgrade their BW instance to 7.0 to make that possible.

However, Reed concluded that, based on what he heard during private SAP Mentor sessions, SAP is shifting internally from an overemphasis on upgrading to SAP ERP 6.0 to paying more attention to the existing 4.6C/4.7 installed base. Good news for those R/3 users.

As for me, what didn’t I like about TechEd? Pretty much the same thing everyone else beefed about: the fact that every presentation included a slide with that odious “disclaimer legalese” about forward-looking statements. Remember the Bobby Fuller Four classic, “I Fought the Law and the Law Won”? Evidently the same thing goes for corporate lawyers. We fought ‘em, and they won.