SAP Analytics Cloud 2025 QRC 3 Preview

It’s mid-summer 2025, and that can only mean one thing: the new SAP Analytics Cloud quarterly release is coming! To get in the mood, I’ve gone through the recent release notes from the bi-weekly tenant updates and picked out some interesting new features.

AI

AI has finally truly landed in SAP Analytics Cloud. We’ve had the clunky Just Ask (formerly “Search to Insight”) for some time, but with the QRC3 release, we’re making some serious progress.

You can now have SAC generate a formula in a Data Action based on a prompt, and it can also explain a formula to you in script comments. The Data Analyzer has a similar new feature called the AI Formula Assistant that can generate formulas based on some text. In the PowerPoint add-in (yes, it’s little-known but you can link SAC objects to PPT!), SAC can write a summary of a chart. Lastly, SAC can now summarize and translate (data point) comments.

All very interesting developments, and I was eager to see how such LLM integrations would work in SAC, especially in Data Actions and the Data Analyzer. Unfortunately, apparently you need to purchase an AI units license before you can use any of this. Sigh. So I haven’t been able to try any of it yet and am still stuck copy-pasting between SAC and ChatGPT for now. It’s a shame SAP doesn’t offer a model where you can run a small number of prompts for free and only pay for heavier use, like most major LLM providers do. I fear very few customers will be willing to pay for such a limited set of features.

For more information on how to enable the AI-Assisted Features in SAC, check this link.

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De Nederlandse BI Podcast: SAP TechEd 2024

Welkom bij een nieuwe aflevering van de Nederlandse BI Podcast! Het is TechEd seizoen, en hoewel de conferentie dit jaar virtueel is, zijn er genoeg spannende aankondigingen om over te praten. In deze aflevering bespreken we de belangrijkste nieuwsitems uit de keynote van SAP TechEd 2024, met een focus op data en analytics. Ons illustere panel bespreekt onder andere AI, SAP DataSphere, SAP Analytics Cloud, Snowflake (believe it or not) en nog veel meer!

Inhoud:

– AI en Generatieve AI: De opkomst van AI agents binnen SAP en hoe ze complexe bedrijfsprocessen autonoom kunnen uitvoeren. Denk hierbij aan het oplossen van intercompany verschillen en andere repetitieve taken.  
– SAP DataSphere & Data Lakes: We praten over de nieuwe mogelijkheden van SAP DataSphere en hoe het als opvolger van BW4 fungeert. Er is ook aandacht voor de integratie met Data Lakes en de uitdagingen die daarbij komen kijken, zoals het migreren van data van BW naar DataSphere.
– Snowflake integratie: Een verrassende aankondiging was de toevoeging van een Snowflake-adapter binnen de SAP Integration Suite, wat zorgt voor verbeterde integraties met andere dataplatforms.
– Hybride Data-oplossingen: We bespreken ook de hybride aanpak tussen SAP BW en DataSphere en hoe bedrijven voorlopig in beide systemen kunnen opereren terwijl de overgang naar DataSphere wordt doorgevoerd.

Timestamps:

– [00:00:00] Introductie en TechEd 2024 overzicht
– [00:01:30] AI agents en autonome bedrijfsprocessen
– [00:02:50] Data Lakes en SAP DataSphere: de vervanger van BW4?
– [00:05:00] Snowflake integratie en de impact op SAP’s ecosysteem
– [00:07:15] SAP Analytics Cloud updates: wat is er nieuw?
– [00:10:30] Hybride oplossingen tussen BW en DataSphere
– [00:15:00] Toekomst van AI en SAP: wat kunnen we verwachten?
– [00:20:30] Afsluiting en vooruitblik op de rest van TechEd 2024

Key Takeaways:
– AI en generatieve AI gaan een steeds grotere rol spelen binnen SAP’s portfolio.
– SAP DataSphere biedt nieuwe mogelijkheden voor datamanagement, vooral in combinatie met Data Lakes.
– De integratie met Snowflake laat zien dat SAP steeds meer samenwerkt met concurrerende platformen om hybride oplossingen mogelijk te maken.
– Nieuwe updates in SAP Analytics Cloud versterken de analytics- en rapportagemogelijkheden van het platform.

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).

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Dashboards are dead? Really?

I saw this nice discussion on LinkedIn last week on the state of dashboarding. And yes, I was as surprised as you to see a relevant, professional post on this platform in 2022, as LinkedIn has turned into some sort of Facebook lately, but okay… 😅  

The premise of the post was that dashboarding has gone completely out of hand: everybody now creates his own version of the truth with all these modern easy-to-use tools. An interesting memo by ThoughtSpot called Dashboards are dead was included with some thoughts on a different approach for data analysis. The ThoughtSpot solution is driven by natural language search (NLS) and artificial intelligence (AI) and it actually ranks pretty high on the Gartner Quadrant for Analytics and BI. This is actually a very current topic as SAP acquired Askdata last week! Askdata also operates in this area and can be expected to further extend the “Search to Insight” capabilities in SAP Analytics Cloud.  

Time wasted

Although this “Dashboards are dead” document by ThoughtSpot is obviously created for marketing, it does give some interesting insights on how dashboarding and reporting is approached, especially in the world outside of our SAP bubble. Some comments made me scratch my head though. One of the narratives here is that although we have all these fancy dashboards now, still a lot of time is wasted in keeping them up to date with proper data (chapter 3). I actually do recognize this from some projects where we were asked to rebuild/develop some PowerBI solution that had grown out of hand and indeed couldn’t be maintained anymore. But, I absolutely don’t agree that this is because of the tools that are used. 

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