Mastering the SAP^® Business Information Warehouse, Second Edition

A reference guide to the BI capabilities of SAP NetWeaver

Kevin McDonald

Andreas Wilmsmeier

David C. Dixon

W.H. Inmon

About the Authors

KEVIN  MCDONALD is the CEO of Circos.com his second start-up. He was a co-founder and the CEO of COMPENDIT, Inc., an analytic services firm that was acquired by Inforte Corp. in 2004.  He was an Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year regional finalist and was recognized by Entrepreneur magazine for having created a “Hot 100” fastest-growing new business.  Prior to co-founding COMPENDIT Kevin was Director of New Dimension Technology and a corporate spokesperson for SAP, where he had worked in both America and Germany. He was Program Manager during the successful market launch of SAP Business Information Warehouse (SAP BW), and he authored the SAP BW product map that was first used to define the scope and development direction for the software.

Kevin started his career at Baxter Health-care where he held positions in both IT and Finance functions. He has authored numerous articles about SAP’s Business Intelligence Solution for The Data Warehouse Institute’s newsletter, and he has made presentations on business intelligence at DCI’s Data Warehouse World, HP World, ERP World, TDWI conferences, ASUG, SAP TechEd, SAP Sapphire, Decision Processing 98 and 99, and Informatica World. Kevin is an advisor to the Cognos Innovation Center and may he be contacted at kevin.mcdonald@renditionx.com.

ANDREAS WILMSMEIER is a managing director of Inforte Deutschland GmbH. Andreas has been a member of the initial SAP BW core development team, where he has been responsible for designing and implementing parts of the Staging Engine (e. g., the Staging BAPI). Andreas has been consulting SAP BW clients since the initial first customer shipment of SAP BW 1.2A in early 1998 and has continued to contribute to the development of SAP BW by providing feedback from the field and to the development of the Business Content for the financial services and defense industries.

After receiving his diploma in computer science and business economics, Andreas started his career in developing data warehouse and Internet solutions. Prior to working for Inforte, Andreas ran the German subsidiary of COMPENDIT until its acquisition by Inforte in early 2004.

His knowledge of data warehousing, data mining and knowledge management has been showcased at numerous international conferences including SAP Sapphire, SAP TechEd, ASUG, Cebit in Hanover, Germany and Systems in Munich, Germany. Andreas has authored articles in the SAP Technical Journal, now featured on intelligentERP.com and the German language E/3 Magazine. Andreas may be contacted at andreas.wilmsmeier@inforte.com

DAVID C. DIXON is a Vice President with Inforte's SAP Practice where he is responsible for ensuring the quality of Inforte solutions and project deliveries.   A recognized authority in business intelligence, he has extensive full-lifecycle project experience in architecting and implementing complicated global solutions for Fortune 100 companies. David has also worked with the SAP SEM and SAP BI development teams on numerous occasions in support of the latest products.   

Prior to joining Inforte, David worked for COMPENDIT, a consulting firm acquired by Inforte in March 2004, where he was a founding team member. Prior to joining COMPENDIT, he was a Platinum Consultant with SAP. David started his career as a Financials and Controlling (FI/CO) consultant with SAP in 1995, specializing in all of the SAP reporting and analysis applications and tools. An accomplished speaker, he has presented at industry-leading SAP and BI events including SAP TechEd, ASUG and TDWI.  He may be contacted at david.dixon@inforte.com.

BILL INMON is thought of as the “father of the data warehouse” and is co-creator of the “corporate information factory.” He has over 28 years of experience in database technology management and data warehouse design. He is known globally for his seminars on developing data warehouses and has been a keynote speaker for every major computing association and many industry conferences, seminars, and trade shows. As an author, Bill has written about a variety of topics on building, usage, and maintenance of the data warehouse and the corporate information factory. More than 500 of his articles have been published in major computer journals such as Datamation, Computer- World, and Byte magazine. Bill is currently a columnist with Data Management Review, and has been since its inception. He has published 39 books.

Bill founded and took public a Silicon Valley company, Prism Solutions, in 1991. Prism Solutions became Ardent Software, which was acquired by Informix, renamed to Ascential Software, and was acquired by IBM. The software he created is still used by hundreds of companies today.  More recently Bill decided to publish his vast data warehousing information resources on his Web site at www.billinmon.com. The Web site has now grown to support millions of visitors a month. Bill consults with a large number of Fortune 1000 clients, offering data warehouse design and database management services.