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.
Good information to explain how the two solutions are complimentary, but don't know that you delivered on the headline on explaining what "Interoperability" means for these two solutions... Can you explain an example of the "growing interoperability" between Lumira and Webi?