SAP puts StreamWork at the heart of BI tools

SAP will make its collaborative StreamWork platform a central component of its business intelligence products to enable better collaboration across all aspects of its software, the company said on Wednesday.

StreamWork — a collaborative decision-making component — can now be integrated into several SAP applications, including SAP's Customer Relationship Management platform to add social aspects and bring sales teams' operations closer together, SAP said. 

The company is also planning to integrate StreamWork with its main Business Intelligence (BI) platform, BusinessObjects. It said this would give customers the ability to use BI collaboratively throughout their organisation, allowing users to hypothesise, analyse and make quick decisions based on data.

"The new integration capabilities expand [StreamWork's] reach even further so that all types of people — employees, clients, partners and suppliers — can have the opportunity to benefit from secure social collaboration in the context of their work," SAP said in a statement.

SAP has also been working to integrate StreamWork into other applications such as its Product Management Lifecycle (PML) and BusinessObjects Strategy Management applications. The company said that the integration into these products helps organisations to work more productively and to become more "agile and risk-aware" by defining key performance indicators.

SAP announced in February that StreamWork also supports applications built using OpenSocial APIs. As a result, customers can use services such as Google Translate, Google Docs and Doodle with StreamWork.