SAP has been try­ing to find its way into the data visu­al­iza­tion mar­ket for a while — a mar­ket that is large­ly dom­i­nat­ed by niche play­ers such as Tableau, Qlik, and Domo. For many years, SAP’s answer was to dump devel­op­ment dol­lars into SAP Lumi­ra. Late­ly, it seemed that was work­ing, as SAP Lumira’s func­tion­al­i­ty start­ed to rival the Tableaus of the world. 

Then in late 2015, SAP made a soft­ware as a ser­vice (SaaS) play in data visu­al­iza­tion with Cloud for Ana­lyt­ics. This was sub­se­quent­ly named SAP Busi­nes­sOb­jects Cloud before it set­tled into its cur­rent nomen­cla­ture: SAP Ana­lyt­ics Cloud. In those past two-plus years, SAP Lumi­ra Dis­cov­ery (the new name for the user-friend­ly data visu­al­iza­tion half of SAP Lumi­ra 2.0) and SAP Ana­lyt­ics Cloud have shared SAP’s data visu­al­iza­tion focus. From now on, that will not be the case — SAP will be invest­ing 100% of its inno­va­tion efforts into SAP Ana­lyt­ics Cloud.

Faster Inno­va­tion Required

“We have received feed­back that we need to inno­vate faster,” says Mike Flan­na­gan, who spoke with ASUG ahead of the announce­ment. ​“More to the point of con­cern, we were get­ting feed­back from cus­tomers who were not real­ly sure if they should be on [SAP Lumi­ra or SAP Ana­lyt­ics Cloud]. We decid­ed it is time to sim­pli­fy what we are doing, to sim­pli­fy cus­tomer strat­e­gy, and also to move at a speed we are being asked to move.” 

This doesn’t mean that SAP is stop­ping its invest­ment in SAP Lumi­ra’s Dis­cov­ery side entire­ly. The on-premise prod­uct will con­tin­ue to receive per­for­mance updates, along with fix­es for any func­tion­al gaps left behind in the move from ver­sion 1.31 to ver­sion 2.0. What it does mean is there won’t be any new fea­tures added to SAP Lumi­ra — that will only hap­pen in SAP Ana­lyt­ics Cloud. 

Why SAP Ana­lyt­ics Cloud over SAP Lumi­ra Discovery?

The deci­sion to pick SAP Ana­lyt­ics Cloud over SAP Lumi­ra Dis­cov­ery came down to the trend­ing mar­ket, Flan­na­gan says. Over the past two years, he says that the per­cent­age of cus­tomers intend­ing to deploy ana­lyt­ics in the cloud has shift­ed from a minor­i­ty to a sig­nif­i­cant major­i­ty. Addi­tion­al­ly, most net new invest­ment in the busi­ness intel­li­gence (BI) and ana­lyt­ics space at SAP is direct­ed toward SAP Ana­lyt­ics Cloud. 

He adds that inte­grat­ing data visu­al­iza­tion with pre­dic­tive ana­lyt­ics and plan­ning — two mod­ules offered in Ana­lyt­ics Cloud — was key to the deci­sion. The trend of mov­ing toward ana­lyt­ics over BI played a fac­tor as well. 

“If I look at what we are doing with SAP Lumi­ra, it’s cer­tain­ly a prod­uct in which we’ve tried to build a lot of inno­v­a­tive func­tion­al­i­ty, but still it is ulti­mate­ly a BI-ori­ent­ed data dis­cov­ery prod­uct,” says Flannagan. 

SAP’s on-premise Pre­dic­tive Ana­lyt­ics prod­uct will also be get­ting less invest­ment in favor of its SAP Ana­lyt­ics Cloud coun­ter­part. This is large­ly a deci­sion based on the on-premise product’s inabil­i­ty to fit the needs of customers. 

“If you look at the [on-premise] Pre­dic­tive Ana­lyt­ics prod­uct today, it prob­a­bly isn’t quite hard­core enough to meet the demands of seri­ous data sci­en­tists, but it’s com­pli­cat­ed enough that it isn’t for the casu­al busi­ness user,” explains Flan­na­gan. ​“The focus now is on ease of use and sim­plic­i­ty, as opposed to chas­ing data scientists.” 

SAP Still Stick­ing with Hybrid

Hybrid — the term in enter­prise soft­ware that describes an archi­tec­ture that is both cloud and on-premise depend­ing on the prod­uct — has been SAP’s rec­om­men­da­tion to cus­tomers across all of its tools, but espe­cial­ly in the BI and ana­lyt­ics space. The move to a heav­ier focus on SAP Ana­lyt­ics doesn’t change that, accord­ing to Flannagan. 

“The most impor­tant thing for cus­tomers who already have made big invest­ments in on-premise BI is that every­thing we are doing with SAP Ana­lyt­ics Cloud is being designed to enable a hybrid archi­tec­ture,” he says. ​“Look at things like live access to data in SAP HANA, live access to data in Busi­ness Ware­house, and live access to SAP Busi­nes­sOb­jects uni­vers­es, and you’ll con­tin­ue to see us build those con­nec­tions. We want to make sure cus­tomer invest­ments are protected.” 

Anoth­er chal­lenge for cus­tomers may be around han­dling the more fre­quent and auto­mat­ic updates in SAP Ana­lyt­ics Cloud com­pared with the every-oth­er-year upgrade cycle of on-premise BI. While it is good to have the lat­est func­tion­al­i­ty avail­able, keep­ing staff updat­ed on what is new can be a major change man­age­ment issue. To that end, Flan­na­gan agrees that SAP will need to pro­vide guid­ance for cus­tomers on the rapid pace of change in these products. 

Bot­tom Line for ASUG Members

SAP Lumi­ra Dis­cov­ery is far from a beloved prod­uct, so there won’t be much of an uproar in response to SAP’s divest­ment there. How­ev­er, there are cus­tomers that have bought into the SAP Lumi­ra road map and have invest­ed time and mon­ey in pro­mot­ing its use with­in their orga­ni­za­tions. For those com­pa­nies, this will be frus­trat­ing news. 

On the pos­i­tive side, SAP is pro­vid­ing clear­er direc­tion about where it is head­ed with data visu­al­iza­tion, so long as they stick with it. The exis­tence of SAP Ana­lyt­ics Cloud along­side on-premise BI tools has often been a source of con­fu­sion for cus­tomers. Know­ing where SAP’s devel­op­ment heart lies, at least for now, will help cus­tomers decide where they direct their own tech­nol­o­gy road maps.