SAP BI Roadmap Webcast Notes Part 1

Earlier this month, SAP provided this webcast.  I checked that this content isn’t duplicated here already SAP EMEA BI 2014 Innovations Webcast Summary

This being a roadmap webcast, things in the future are subject to change and the usual disclaimer applies.  SAP roadmaps cover solutions today, planned innovations (typically 12-18 months in the future) and future direction.  I will not cover the “solutions today” that much.

Solutions Today

Today the SAP BI solution covers several data sources including Hadoop.

Figure 1: Source: SAP

Figure 1 covers today at platform level, and the developer area for the release of BI4.1

SAP HANA Live – views created in HANA for providing operational BI against ECC information

Freeze header was the top requested feature for Web Intelligence

Crystal offers direct access to HANA to take advantage of multi dimensional nature of HANA

The future of dashboarding is Design Studio

Figure 2: Source: SAP

SAP is the largest cloud vendor in number of customers

Lumira Cloud is a software as a service, multi-tenanted.

Figure 3: Source: SAP

Different types of data are supported and the frequency which data is updated is covered in Figure 3

Planned Innovations

Figure 4: Source: SAP

Just released with BI4.1 SP2 is the ability to programmatically connect to the Universe

You can connect to universe as an OData connection

You can embed visualizations, including Fiori and partners

BI Platform to add ability for semantic layer tools to be optimized against the universe, Freehand SQL for Web Intelligence

SAP wants to provide near zero downtime for patching

Figure 5: Source: SAP

I don’t have any notes on this slide but please see they are working on SAP BusinessObjects Lumira direct connectivity to BW.

Figure 6: Source: SAP

They are bringing back extension points

SAP Crystal Reports on HANA; a version of Crystal to be built-into HANA as shown in Figure 6

Figure 7: Source: SAP

Some things listed in Figure 7 are already there for SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio – connect to universe, export to Excel

SDK is introduced for Design Studio

Native HANA deployment is coming for Design Studio

To be continued…

Question & Answer:

Q: When will 4.1 will be available for Edge customers?

A: available today

Q: Does Big Data include big data types such as audio and images?

A: Yes that is part of the variety part

Related Information:

BI 2014 in March in Orlando will cover these topics.  See this link for a discount.

If you have a BI story to share, we are interested in hearing from you at ASUG Annual Conference.  Please see You’re Invited to Submit A Proposal for ASUG Annual Conference 2014 – Share Your Knowledge