SAP EMEA BI 2014 Innovations Webcast Summary

Last week SAP held this webcast to cover 2014 and beyond, where planning to go.

The usual legal disclaimer applies that planned and future features are subject to change.

They said they wanted to ,move from single version of truth to network of truth and bridge from IT to business.

Based on BI Platform, they are adding to agile visualization and advanced

Figure 1: Source: SAP

Past 6 months and next few months is Big Data support – optimizing and improving support

SP3 is planned for Q1, with mostly enhancements for HANA

Figure 2: Source: SAP

Figure 2 shows Semantic Layer SDK improvements for openness and ecosystem enablement

Figure 3: Source: SAP

Figure 3 shows what is new in Mobile BI 5.1

Mobile 5.0 was a big release – consistency and improvement in user experience, with consistent interaction and controls and LDAP, SMP, enterprise authentication

Figure 4: Source: SAP

SAP said they would continue with offline support

Figure 4 shows Mobile SDK customization enhancements and the ability to take content and embed in third party applications

Figure 5: Source: SAP

Figure 5 shows the SAP planned mobile roadmap.  SAP mentioned the ability to monitor on mobile device

Figure 6: Source: SAP

Figure 6 shows what is new in Web Intelligence, SP2, which was available on Friday, 11/22

Value grouping/custom grouping and consuming Excel spreadsheets through BI Launchpad are part of SP2

Figure 7: Source: SAP

Figure 7 shows more details regarding value grouping; SAP said you can look at things differently with value grouping

Figure 8: Source: SAP

Excel as a data source was supported before WebI Rich Client

Now this is supported for the business – upload in personal folder on BI platform and then create report using Excel as a datasource to “bring personal data to server side”

Figure 9: Source: SAP

Figure 9 shows future plans for Web Intelligence.

Figure 10: Source: SAP

Figure 10 shows plans for Design Studio and Dashboards.  Some are in the recently GA Design Studio 1.2 release, others are planned for the future.

Figure 11: Source: SAP

Planned in coming months Installs on HANA and looking at BI platform for future too. Lumira server on premise is coming

Figure 12: Source: SAP

Figure 12 shows what is planned for Lumira, including publishing storyboards to the cloud, and handheld support.

Question & Answer

Q: We use BI4 what is the migration effort to BI4.1

A: Like a service pack – run upgrade installer

Q: What should I upgrade to? Should I go to BI4 or BI4.1

A: BI4.1; platform is “hardened”

Q: Can we save the Lumira content to BI4.1 platform

A: Today you can save Lumira datasets to the platform and open those in Explorer.  Working on support for the stories to BI platform (see Figure 12)

Note this part of the webcast was only 20 minutes, so there is not much text to accompany the slides.