Lumira and Design Studio fusion, what impacts for exisiting customers?

Hi everyone.

If, like me, you followed attentively what happened at SAPPHIRE (or better, attended it), you might have noticed that, finally, SAP officially unveiled their strategy regarding the fusion between Lumira and Design Studio.

Blair Wheadon, solution manager Analytics at SAP, has talked about that recently.

And even if there have been some official talks about this fusion before SAPPHIRE, it remained unclear in most of the minds (in mine anyway).

Well, the will to create one product from Lumira and Design Studio can be understandable.

From my point of view, Lumira and Design Studio allow their respective target users to (mostly) achieve what they want, but both suffer from things that prevent them to clearly shine above the market.

Lumira, on one hand, offers great self-service experiences, but suffers from what I would call “cap effect”, by not going deep enough when coming to restitution, to story-telling. Once you have stunning visualizations, you are left with not that much possibilities to clearly present your story, even if I recognize that what is in place leverage the self-service spirit.

Design Studio, in the other hand, allows the users to create poweful business apps, but suffers from a “too-high entry price”, as seen by the prospects/customers (in reality, it’s not that hard 😉 ). The simple fact to tell that it requires some javascripting tends to “cool” interested people.

The fusion between Design Studio and Lumira therefore appears as a move that will try to fill the gap that exists between business apps and self-service. And in this way, the philosophy behind it is really good.

But still, there are some questions that remain unanswered until few days.

Amongst them, is the question of custom extensions, built by partners.

As some of you might already know, Design Studio and Lumira are really different products technically speaking, and so are their SDK.

Lots of partners have developped extensions to fill exisiting needs in these two products, and to be clear, they have developped one extension for Lumira and another one for Design Studio, because let’s be honest, interoperability does not really exist between them (at least for the moment).

I therefore think this topic matters a lot, as it will impact lots of partners AND customers.

Before SAPPHIRE, I have to confess that this issue concerned me and my colleagues here at Galigeo.

But as I always tell myself, there is no problem, only solution.

SAPPHIRE was the opportunity to discuss directly with the brains on how we – SAP and partners – could work together to make it easy for the customers.

As an SAP Solution Extension Partner, we are and will keep on collaborating with SAP teams to ensure a smooth transition for exisiting customers, that use SAP and our solutions.

We have to keep focused on our main missions : always deliver more values to customers.

The fusion will clearly simplify the offer and we also have to adapt on our side, this is what is called being innovative.

“Here’s your captain, everything is under control”

Br,

Vincent