De Nederlandse BI Podcast: SAPPHIRE 2024

The latest episode of the Dutch BI Podcast is hosted by Ronald Konijnenburg, along with Tim Koster, Xavier Hacking, and Jef Baeyens. Unfortunately, Martijn and Joost are absent. This episode mainly focuses on recent developments and announcements during the “SAP SAPPHIRE 2024” event.

Main Topics:

1. Seamless Planning:

• Jef Baeyens discusses the new release in the Seamless Planning beta program, where a planning model can be deployed in Datasphere without replicating the planning data. However, there are still some limitations, such as importing actuals and master data.

• Tim Koster emphasizes that this is an important step, although there is still work to be done to achieve full integration.

2. SAP Analytics Cloud:

• Xavier Hacking mentions some incremental improvements, such as the Light Viewer feature and the announcement that the Classic Design Experience will soon be discontinued.

• The impact of these changes is discussed, particularly for users still working with older versions of Stories and Analytics Applications.

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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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