The Best Is Not Always the Biggest

I just got back from a recent trip to Egypt (my favorite place to visit) and although I was there to work on an excavation, I had 2 free days in Cairo.

While I have visited the pyramids at Giza, Saqqara, Dashur many times, I had recently seen a YouTube documentary about the Giza plateau that focused on the huge cemetery of royal and noble tombs next to the Great pyramid of Khufu. Apparently in this complex is the tomb of Meresankh III, granddaughter of Khufu and wife of Pharoah Khafre, which has remarkable and beautiful statues and wall paintings unprecedented for this period.

            (Great pyramid of Khufu)

So, I headed off to Giza and bought a ticket for all the sites there and spent a couple of hours going into and crawling up the narrow tunnels inside both the Great pyramid of Khufu (the largest and only remaining ancient wonder of the world) and Khafre (the second largest), said hello to the sphinx and headed off to find the tomb of Meresankh.

Not so easy since there were no real signs and even the police and guides I spoke to were not sure where it was. After 20 minutes of exploring the cemetery area, I finally found it and was not surprised to find that I was the only person there along with the guard on duty.

                    
     (Tomb of Meresankh)                             (Colorful scenes from the tomb of Meresankh)

I was in heaven having the place to myself and spent a whole hour experiencing this truly amazing tomb with its vibrantly decorated wall paintings and unusual statues of women and scribes.

Yes, the Great Pyramid of Khufu is a site to behold but there are no decorations or wall paintings inside and after climbing to the burial chamber along steep narrow tunnels, you emerge tired, hot, dripping with sweat and a bit dazed from hitting your head so many times! Overall, it’s a bit of an anti-climax.

After spending an hour in the tomb of Meresankh, I emerged elated. Fulfilled and so happy to have seen this amazing place that most people have never heard of yet alone seen.

                   
             (Great pyramid of Khufu)                                                  (Amazing Tomb of Meresankh)

When I look at the usage of BusinessObjects today, I see something very similar. While many customers have created these huge deployments with thousands of reports and users, they are often unaware of the remarkable data exploration and visualization features right in front of their eyes.

So many BusinessObjects customers have turned to tools like PowerBI and Tableau because they think they cannot do the same data discovery and dashboarding in BusinessObjects – but actually they can.

For the last decade, BusinessObjects Web Intelligence Version 4 has added more and more dashboarding and visualization features such that with the latest 4.3 release, you can create any Tableau/PowerBI equivalent dashboard.

In addition, the new Web Intelligence 4.3 data merging, profiling and transformation capabilities are again equivalent to what is available in Tableau and PowerBI.

Yet, here we are, still looking at and using BusinessObjects like the Great pyramid of Khufu and missing out on the splendid tomb of Meresankh.

At this year’s IBIS, the theme is BusinessObjects – Light Years Ahead and we hope to shine a light on some of those amazing and not so well-known features.

For those who cannot make the event, we will be announcing the virtual SpeakBO Experience 2023 event at the end of this month which will run at the end of September.

Both events will clearly show the best is not always the biggest!