By Cindi Howson
Please note: this blog site has been migrated and will be discontinued in the near future; please access new site at www.biscorecard.com/blog.
Sapphire this year was all about simplicity, the cloud, and millenials. That's the message that CEO Bill McDermott wanted to drive home in his keynote. BI, meanwhile, took a back stage to HANA and Cloud announcements.
At SAP, all roads lead to HANA, whether for BI or for transaction processing, on-premises or in the cloud. HANA is just three years old, and as an in-memory appliance, SAP has rapidly seeded the market with developers, fostered its partner network, and introduced new products that leverage the speed of in-memory. Customer Norwegian Cruise Lines spoke of how HANA allowed them to better analyze their data, faster than a previous data warehouse, and saving $700 million annually. Most interesting to me is how Norwegian Cruise Lines hadn't used anything from SAP before HANA, a proof point that HANA is not only for big ERP customers. The NFL with its fantasy football app is leveraging HANA, mobile, predictive, and Lumira to support its millions of fans, a customer base of millions and growing in the 25% to 50% range annually. Seoul University Hospital reduced its query time from hours to seconds, with a 147% return on investment in HANA. More importantly, CIO Dr. Hwang, said HANA allows them to analyze comments that were never before accessible.
While all the news with HANA seemed positively glowing, news on the leadership and BI front in particular was a bit more fractured. Last month, CTO Vishal Sikka abruptly resigned, amid speculation that he was frustrated the position of CEO was not in his future. In the BI space, two key people with Adam Binnie and Jason Rose also recently moved on. Insiders say the timing is coincidental. Outsiders worry about the impact on the BI roadmap for a product line that is one of the most complex in the industry. McDermott's vision for simplicity has a long way to go in BI.
Jayne Landry, newly appointed General Manager of BI and taking over from Binnie, outlined the BI roadmap. She conceded that for most BI segments, there are two, sometimes three, products (visual discovery includes Explorer and Lumira; dashboards includes Design Studio and Dashboards a.k.a. Xcelsius). The vision to simplify the product line was clear; the execution of how and when to get there was anything but.
Dashboard users were assured there would eventually be a migration utility to Design Studio, the strategic product, and in the interim, were told to check out a product from partner APOS. Landry conceded that killing Desktop Intelligence was a mistake. At issue is how to support existing investments, while focusing resources on moving forward. In empathy for SAP, who could have predicted that Apple would kill Flash, a technology on which Dashboards is based?
Long-time customers have been rightfully worried that SAP cares more about newer products HANA and Lumira than about the mature and broadly deployed SAP BusinessObjects. Judging from the headlines and excitement around these newer products, they might be right to worry. However, Landry shared a pie chart describing the company's three areas of analytics: enterprise BI, agile analytics, advanced analytics.
Category |
Main Products |
Developers |
Release Cycle |
Enterprise BI |
SAP BusinessObjects Crystal Reports Dashboards Design Studio |
600 |
6 to 12 months |
Agile Analytics |
Lumira Explorer |
200 |
6 to 8 weeks |
Advanced Analytics |
Infinite Insight (KXEN) Predictive Analysis |
100 |
Enterprise BI then is clearly getting the lion's share of development resources, but is indeed on a slower release cycle. Speaker Ty Miller, Senior Director of BI, likened Lumira to the shiny new Tesla—innovative engineering, new technology, disruptive— while the BI Platform is like the tried-and-true Porsche. It's an apt analogy.
It would seem then that it's not that SAP cares more about Lumira, but rather, that there's more frequent news as it's on such a rapid release cycle. To that end, the noteworthy new features in version 17 (due out this month) includes (refer to BIScorecard.com for a detailed review):
- InfoGraphics, an evolution to Stories that combines visualizations, with text and images, and a greater degree of formatting
- Direct connect to on-premises HANA and BW data from Lumira Cloud
- Support for MAC , with the beta available mid June
Customer Daimler Trucks gave a great demo of their Lumira application for dealers.
Also around the corner is a new release of Mobile, in which WebIntelligence reports can be filtered with a tap, even in offline mode. Users can save those filters to create a customized view of their reports. For offline users, they also can now set an option so that reports are automatically refreshed when connected, ideal for sales people who need to be sure they have the latest content cached.
Stated improvements to the BI platform (but with no specific timeframe) include:
- Free hand SQL. This is huge, but as I've heard it as a roadmap item for a couple of years now, I won't hold my breath until I see the beta.
- Live Office support for newer universes created in 4.x (.UNX); this has been a hole in the product portfolio since version 4 was first released in 2012. Microsoft added support for universes in Power Query last month, a partial solution for long-time Live Office users.
- Parity in the DHTML and Java client WebI interfaces
SAP seems to be at a cross roads in the BI and business analytics space; trying to innovate at the pace of smaller, more nimble competitors such as Tableau and Qlik, while also serving and enhancing the bread and butter enterprise BI and ERP customers. HANA, HANA Enterprise Cloud, Business Suite on HANA, and Simple Finance are the bigger ticket items and next generation platforms that have been a mainstay of SAP for forty plus years. Straddling both worlds is not easy.
We have used BO for years, but the lack of freehand is a deal killer. The generated code is just way too inefficient and hard to manage. Universe only is probably ok with simpler databases.
Past R3.1SP7, we are looking for alternatives. If we must convert, it will not be to WEBI, but to something we can rely upon. Simpler tools such as Oracle BI or even MS SQL reporting require a little more work, but in the long run I think we can trust the platforms. And I would much rather maintain either of these than a frustratingly inefficient report built on badly generated queries.
Posted by: Sam Walker | August 26, 2014 at 10:59 AM
Thanks for the feedback, Sam. yes, a lot of customers have been left in the lurch without the free hand SQL. So it's planned, but no idea on timing. Microsoft allows you to customize the SQL but is less flexible in multiple data sources / multi fact. With OBI EE, you can see the SQL, I have to check if you can modify it. It's possible with the Publisher module, not sure about Answers.
BTW. How did you find this blog - we are trying to move all posts to www.biscorecard.com/blog. This typepad one is just a duplicate for transition time.
Regards,
Cindi
Posted by: Cindi Howson | September 02, 2014 at 10:29 AM
Hello Cindi, thanks for the blog post, very interesting.
@Sam. Thanks for the feedback, I understand your frustration regarding FHSQL.
FYI: FHSQL is back in WebI in a phased approach. Step1 will be into the BI4.1 SP05 (already available), step2 will be into the BI4.1 SP06 (june 2015).
More details are available here : http://scn.sap.com/community/businessobjects-web-intelligence/blog/2014/09/29/freehand-sql-fhsql-is-coming-to-web-intelligence
Kind regards,
GB
Posted by: GregoryB | February 10, 2015 at 03:52 AM