Classic FTW!
De Nederlandse BI Podcast – Episode 27
A new episode of De Nederlandse BI Podcast, live from the BI2017 SAPinsider conference in Amsterdam. Topics are:
- BI2017 Keynote
- SAP Analytics Hub
- BPC 11
- SAP Analytics Cloud
- SAP Lumira 2.0
- Predictive Analytics with R
- The food at BI2017.
As always, you can find the show in iTunes, on our website or just use the Podcast player below to listen instantly. Warning: Dutch content only!
BI2017 Amsterdam recap
Last week was the SAPinsider BI2017 event in Amsterdam, which we visited with a team from Interdobs. I’ve seen some very cool demos on especially SAP Analytics Cloud, some Design Studio 1.x and Lumira 1.x customer use cases, Roambi and BI Platform administration tooling. Unfortunately the state of SAP Analytics Hub was exactly as what I already figured out from the slides a few weeks ago, but at least I was able to see a live demo and talk a bit to the developers.
The first two days didn’t bring that much new information for me, luckily Friday was stacked with sessions showing a lot (live) demos so that made up a lot. Less slides = more value.
Overall I think the event was very mediocre, not much new stuff, only a few deep-dive hardcore tech sessions (BI Platform Support Tool FTW!), only one hands-on tool session (Lumira Discovery), too many breaks, terrible food (except for the fruit) and Pepsi Coke.
We made some videos to recap day 1 and 2, and on the third day we recorded De Nederlandse BI Podcast episode 27.
SAP Analytics Hub – A first look
In my previous post on the new names for the SAP BI products, the list (in the tweet) also included a new product: SAP Analytics Hub. Unfortunately I don’t have access yet, and there is also not that much material available on this product, but enough to at least get an idea of the purpose and direction. So let’s have a look.
It is common for an organization to have multiple places or platforms to host reports. Even within SAP-only environments we see this: BI Launchpad, Fiori Launchpad, Analytics Cloud, BEx Web. For the end-user this is of course an awful experience, as he has to switch between different platforms to get to all his reports, and needs to ‘learn’ where to find what.
The SAP Analytics Hub is advertised as the single platform and entry point for users, where they can find all their reports. At my current project we positioned and setup the BI Launchpad for this, but we had to use a bunch of workarounds and have to live with all the limitations of the tool.
Looking at the roadmap and FAQ files, I see that the initial version is basically a web-based portal that contains a bunch of links to reports. These links point either to cloud or on-premise solutions, and this can be both SAP as well as non-SAP software. Each link may contain some additional information and a preview of the report.
SAP BI product name shake-up: the 2017 edition
Another year, another set of product names for our beloved SAP BI tools. Seemingly out of nowhere a list of new names were presented last week at the SAPPHIRENOW event in Orlando FL. Even after all the name changes we had in the past 10 years (‘member Xcelsius?), this still came a bit as a surprise for me.
When @SAP acknowledged name-changes across #businessintelligence & #analytics, I didn't realize it was quite this extensive! @SAPPHIRENOW pic.twitter.com/Fa5W5fjdGh
— Doug Henschen (@DHenschen) May 18, 2017
So let’s have a look at what happened here. First it seems like the whole BI portfolio is now recognized as SAP Analytics. Apparently it was named SAP BusinessObjects Analytics before (I always thought it was ‘SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence’, but that could be because I’m mostly focussing on the BI part of the tools), but this makes sense. The old BI terminology is probably seen as too limited, as the current and future analytics will go way beyond only internal data and usage scenarios. Of course the bigger change is that SAP continues to ditch the BusinessObjects brand: SAP BusinessObjects Cloud becomes SAP Analytics Cloud, SAP BusinessObjects Lumira will be SAP Lumira and SAP BusinessObjects Roambi just SAP Roambi.
Meanwhile, some of the more classic BusinessObjects tools keep their BusinessObjects brand: SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence, SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise. Analysis for Office loses the ‘for Office’ specification: SAP BusinessObjects Analysis. Following the conversion strategy this makes sense, as Analysis OLAP hasn’t been improved for a while and should be replaced by the Design Studio generic analysis template. Talking about Design Studio, which is not in the above photo, it is now labeled as SAP Analytics Design Studio (!!!) on SAP.com. Which, is a pretty insane name change at this point in time as the upcoming edition of the tool (only weeks away) will merge into Lumira 2.0 anyway. Talking about insane stuff, when I was browsing SAP.com I also saw that SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards (Xcelsius) is still actively advertised. Madness.
Anyway, what I don’t understand is why SAP is keeping this BusinessObjects brand alive at all. Does it still have a value if all your major (new) tools are not using it? Maybe it’s for the non-SAPBW/HANA legacy customer base? But come on, it has been 10 years now since the acquisition and this is again (or still) a mess. Some tools have SAP Analytics in the name, some SAP BusinessObjects and some only SAP. I can’t wait for next year’s edition!
Book review: SAP BusinessObjects Analysis Office – The Comprehensive Guide
With all the buzz around the big upcoming Lumira 2 release, you would almost forget that there are other SAP BI tools in the market as well. For example Analysis for Office: the successor of the good old BEx Analyzer. For some reason these tools have never been a very popular topic to write about. This is somewhat strange, as Analysis for Office, and even BEx Analyzer, are still extremely popular under SAP BI customers and therefor widely used besides the ’newer’ front-end tools.
Analysis for Office is not a difficult tool to learn, but it has a lot of hidden, unknown and even misunderstood features that are very useful for data analysts. My head still explodes when I see somebody using Analysis for Office to ‘download’ all the data into Excel, manually copy/paste the results to different tabs, and starts applying Excel filters, sorting etc. So there is absolutely a need for guidance here.
Luckily, Tobias Meyer published SAP BusinessObjects Analysis Office – The Comprehensive Guide last year on version 2.3, and this year an updated version on Analysis for Office 2.4. The book covers all the features that Analysis for Office (both the Excel and PowerPoint versions) offers in detail, but goes a lot further than that. Ever heard about Shortcut properties for the Analysis for Office add-on launcher?
