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tom_woodhead
Participant

Earlier this year, we  were involved in an SAPinsider Q & A event with the title "Will Your Web Intelligence Journey  Lead You into Lumira?" The session featured numerous SAP subject  matter experts providing live answers to questions from an online audience. This  format proved to be an excellent means of getting input and insights on key  topics from both the Web Intelligence and Lumira teams.


View the SAPinsider Questions and Answers here.

The unfortunate side to this very positive  SAPinsider event was that, due to time constraints, many good questions were  necessarily given short answers. We decided to follow up with some of the Q  & A participants and explore some of the questions in greater depth.

WebI? Lumira? Both!

Naturally, given the  title of the event, one of threads that ran through the Q & A was the  relationship between Web Intelligence and Lumira, and most particularly whether  Lumira would replace Web Intelligence in the long run. Ty and Frank were most  definitely in agreement here:

Question:
    There is a notion with some of our  clients that Lumira will replace WebI in future? How true is that?
   
    Frank Prabel (from the Web Intelligence Team: Not true. 🙂 Web Intelligence and Lumira serve different needs.  Web Intelligence addresses the reporting market while Lumira covers the agile  visualization and data discovery markets. We expect both products to continue  to play a leading role on the SAP BI roadmap.
   
    Ty Miller (from the Lumira Team): Absolutely right on, Frank. Fully agree.

The SAP BI roadmap  lays out a convergence strategy for the SAP BI platform, and as the slide below  makes clear, the key to that convergence is interoperability:

Where Lumira and Web  Intelligence Fit in the SAP BI Convergence Strategy

Source: "Run Simple: Convergence of the SAP  BusinessObjects BI Product Portfolio"

When we followed up  with Gregory Botticchio (from the Web Intelligence team), he made it clear that  Web Intelligence would remain a key part of the convergence strategy:

We no longer talk as  much about Web Intelligence, simply because we are bringing new tools to  market, and they naturally get more marketing attention, but the fact is that  Web Intelligence remains by far our leading BI tool in terms of adoption by  companies and by end users. We continue to invest in the development of Web  Intelligence.

When we followed up  with Adrian Westmoreland (from the Lumira team), he made it clear that the  future would see Web Intelligence and Lumira complementing each other more and  more:

Web Intelligence  being the Swiss army knife of BI tools, it does everything reasonably well.  Lumira will not replace Web Intelligence, but it will evolve to assume some of  the use cases that are not in the Web Intelligence reporting sweet spot. It  will simply be easier for users to adopt Lumira for these use cases than to try  to force them into Web Intelligence workflows not designed to handle them.  Lumira opens up so many possibilities for user interaction that are just not  there for Web Intelligence reports.

You can do many things  with Web Intelligence, and if all you are going to do with Lumira is to create  graphs and charts, you might just as easily use Web Intelligence to build them.  However, Lumira has data preparation, composition and layout capabilities that  go beyond what are available in Web Intelligence, allowing you to accomplish  some of the tasks you would normally perform in Web Intelligence more quickly,  more easily, and with more flexibility.

Web Intelligence remains  the means of presenting your data discovery, exploration and visualizations to  targeted information consumers, while Lumira increases your ability to explore  data and create compelling visualizations. So, to answer the title question  from the SAPinsider Q & A, your Web Intelligence journey may indeed lead  you into Lumira, but your Lumira journey won't lead you out of Web  Intelligence. Moving forward, some of the "sweet spots" may shift, and  the interoperability between the two solutions will be one of the primary  factors in the evolution of your data discovery, exploration, visualization and  presentation workflows.

For those wishing to  explore these topics on their own, the online Lumira tutorials are a good place to start.

In our next post: The Future of Web Intelligence and Lumira  Interoperability.

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