The Future of Web Intelligence and Lumira Interoperability

In our previous post, Web  Intelligence, Lumira and the SAP Convergence Strategy, we concluded  that your Web Intelligence journey might lead you into Lumira, but that your  Lumira journey won’t lead you out of Web Intelligence. These are complementary  rather than competing solutions, but it is their growing interoperability which  may determine their place in your data discovery, exploration, visualization  and delivery workflows.
  Gregory Botticchio summed up the difference  between the two solutions:

Web Intelligence  is specifically designed to deliver reports. That is its core function. Lumira  makes development of a range of such engaging visualizations much simpler, but  it does not replace the reporting functionality of Web Intelligence.

Regardless of how advanced and engaging  your Lumira visualizations become, you will most likely continue to deliver  them to your larger audience via Web Intelligence. Clearly, the solutions are  different, serve different purposes, and one will not replace the other, but  how will we be able to use them together for more efficient and more effective  workflows?

Interoperability – Striving for the Best of Both Worlds

Interoperability is key to this efficiency  and effectiveness. It is desirable, because the two solutions represent  dramatically different approaches to data, and the growing interoperability  between the two will allow enterprises to leverage the sweet spots of both.

As noted by Frank Prabel in our discussion:

There are differences in the ways that Web Intelligence and Lumira work  with data. In order to use enterprise data, Web Intelligence goes through a  universe. For the analyst who is doing data acquisition (i.e., working outside  of enterprise data), Lumira provides better capabilities in terms of being  better able to cleanse and manipulate data before creating a visualization.  With Web Intelligence, you see enterprise data only, without the acquisition  and manipulation.

So, while Web Intelligence is great for  exploring enterprise data (known unknowns?) and presenting it in  straightforward charts and graphs, Lumira allows you to work outside of  enterprise data to find new insights from new data (unknown unknowns?). Another  differentiator is ease of use. You can achieve most anything in Web  Intelligence, but many of these task will just be easier in Lumira, because of  its user- friendly interface.

Frank Prabel confirmed that interoperability  between the two solutions is an ongoing project:

In the future we  see the two products coexisting, rather than one replacing the other. We see  greater interoperability between Web Intelligence and Lumira to come. Also,  Lumira is a great solution for people working outside of trusted data sources  (i.e., from personal data sources), while Web Intelligence is firmly  established as an enterprise BI tool, meaning that it uses trusted data  sources.

There are already use cases in which you may  realize this interoperability. You can create visualizations in Lumira after  acquiring, cleansing and manipulating data, but you may want to present that  visualization in a document using a document  using a standardized format with headers and footers and advanced formatting  options. Web Intelligence is then your logical choice to complete this workflow.

Lumira Server for the BI Platform  & Trusted Data

While one of Lumira’s  features is its ability to work with non-enterprise data sources, the release  of Lumira Server for the BI platform means that it is now also a trusted data  solution, providing the ability to develop visualizations from enterprise data  sources as well.

We’ll have a look at  what this means for Lumira users, both business and IT, in our next post, Lumira Server for the BI Platform – Trusted  Data Solution.