Thanks Xavier... Hi Antoine, for me really the designing part of SAC is very weak compared to other tools. How…
De Nederlandse BI Podcast: SAP Analytics Cloud & AI
SAP Analytics Cloud en AI is het onderwerp van deze Podcast!
Wat doen JustAsk en Joule en hoe gaat de toekomst eruit zien volgens ons? Jef Baeyens, Xavier Hacking, Joost Hinderink en Ronald Konijnenburg geven hun mening en wat zal nou echt toegevoegde waarde geven aan onze klanten?
De Nederlandse BI Podcast: SAP TechEd 2023
We’re back!! 😉
SAP TechEd 2023 is inmiddels weer achter de rug. Wat is er allemaal aangekondigd? Wat viel op tijdens de keynote? Wat is er nieuw in SAC en Datasphere? Dit en meer in een splinternieuwe aflevering van De Nederlandse BI Podcast!
[Sorry, Dutch only, but maybe some AI tool can translate the podcast! 😀]
Video: SAP Analytics Cloud Debugging [2023.14]
With the introduction of the Unified Story Mode, scripting within SAP Analytics Cloud becomes more accessible for many story developers.
Let’s look at some options to debug your SAC scripts!
Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms 2023
Sometimes it feels as we are at the end of history and nothing changes anymore. I’ve been reading these annual Gartner “Magic Quadrant” reports on the state of Analytics and Business Intelligence (ABI) for a couple of years now and every edition concludes the same, at least for the “big four” that I look at as I encounter those the most in project (SAP, Microsoft, Salesforce Tableau and Qlik). MS Power BI on top, Tableau second and Qlik still somewhat regarded as a leader. However, SAP is getting closer and closer to take over that third spot!
You can find the report summary here and use the slider below to compare the quadrants of 2022 and 2023.
So what?
The question is of course what all of this actually means. Gartner defined 12 “critical capabilities” that these ABI platforms should contain and the vendors nicely follow up by making sure each topic is somewhat covered. That’s probably why we have these “Search to Insight” and “Smart Discovery” features in SAC that are cool for demos but actually don’t work in real business situations (and thus are never used).
Don’t get me wrong, these capabilities eventually make sense to have in the SAC (and SAP Datasphere) platform, but as someone who is working with this kind of tooling on a daily base I’d rather see some more development effort on the basic stuff (for example enriching reporting features) and hold off a bit more on the stuff that is not “ready” anyway.
SAP Analytics Cloud
But let’s have a quick look at what the Gartner findings are for SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC).
Book review: SAP Analytics Cloud – Financial Planning and Analysis (SAP Press)
Another review on yet another SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) book? Oh yes! This time I read SAP Analytics Cloud – Financial Planning and Analysis, again by SAP Press, and I was very glad to see this 450+ pages strong book on SAC Planning being announced some time ago.
Few may know that planning is actually the original pillar that SAC was built on. Back in 2015, the very first version of SAC was called SAP Cloud for Planning and it was aimed at being a pure SaaS planning solution! Nowadays the focus of most users may be on reporting and analytics in SAC stories and applications, using the live data connections instead of acquired data models, but still plannings is an important part of SAC. So I think it’s good to have a dedicated book for this, especially as certain SAC planning concepts are completely different from the reporting and analytics side of SAC. Think of designing and managing acquired planning models vs. using live models, working with different data versions, planning-specific features as data actions, allocations, using the built-in calendar, etc.
What I like is that not just the technical options are listed in this book, but also the overall processes in financial planning are introduced and explained. What are we actually trying to achieve here, who is involved and what are the steps? This makes it so much easier to grasp the concepts and (technical) solutions that are offered in SAC. By the way, the sales planning sample scenario that is used throughout the book is based one of the business content packages for SAC: Sales Planning for SAP S/4HANA Cloud (SAP Best Practices). Unfortunately I only figured this out after going through almost the full book, as only at the very end there is a chapter on several business content samples. But it could be helpful if you’d want to try a couple of things yourself, without having to build up a complete model first, load the data etc.
