Introducing SAP Lumira 2.0, And How It Complements Other SAP Products

The SAP Analytics strategy revolves around Insight, Decision, and Action. You can hear the details of the strategy here, at the recorded #askSAP webcast. In a nutshell, we want to help you uncover new insights to help transform your business—and then turn those insights into new decisions and actions.

How do we get there? At SAP, we firmly believe in cloud. We are the cloud company, powered by HANA! However, many customers tell me they are either very early in their cloud journey, or are unsure where to start. We have you covered there, too. Not only do we believe in a beautiful, mobile-first cloud experience, but we continue to innovate in our on-premise solutions, too (see Innovate the Core in the graphic below).

For more details, see the SAP On Premise BI Statement of Direction and the Analytics brochure

Self-service Analytics and the SAP strategy

A key dimension of the SAP strategy is self-service analytics, whether your analytics team is using cloud or on-premise solutions. Self-service analytics is a sub-set of your overall analytics strategy and can use the same best practices framework, but specifically focused on self-service. For an in-depth look at self-service analytics, check out this blog series on self-service BI.

One key is that self-service analytics appears differently to different users. The key is to make sure you are working with your BI Competency Center to identify how the requirements vary by use case and user.

These are common use cases, grouped by user types: make sure to clarify what your users mean when they request self-service BI capabilities.

Self-service analytics absolutely requires solutions for Business users and decision makers, dashboard composition for business users, data discovery for casual users, and IT enablement.

SAP BI Solutions

Because self-service analytics can be so varied by your user base, we provide solutions tuned to the specific personas and use cases required. As you saw in the SAP On Premise BI Statement of Direction referenced earlier, we are converging on premise solutions around SAP Lumira, SAP BusinessObjects Analysis for Microsoft Office, SAP Crystal Reports, and SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence.

Because these clients all use the BusinessObjects BI platform as a solid, scalable foundation, you get interoperability between the solutions, too. For an overview of the BI Platform, check out the BI 4.2 solution brief.

What is SAP Lumira?

SAP Lumira is a new release that converges the clients for data discovery and applications into one solution. This convergence helps bring IT and Business together for agile innovation through a consumer-grade UX and impressive capability to access all data in the moment.

With SAP Lumira 2.0, we have put extra work into the interoperability elements of our strategy. With this release, we have simplified the workflows between data discovery and creating analytics applications and dashboards. These two self-service analytics styles will now not only share a server component, but will only have one file format. Big whoop? WHOOP! This means your business users can actively prototype their analytics applications and dashboards in an easy, intuitive environment. When complex navigation or integrated planning is required, for example, your power users can open the exact same file in Lumira Designer to add that capability. No passing back and forth of requirements. No prototyping in a drawing tool or PowerPoint.

Pretty cool.

As you can see, SAP Lumira is a key component of our analytics strategy going forward!

What to do next

In the next months, you’ll be hearing many more details on SAP Lumira. I’ve personally briefed many many customers and user groups on the solution, and the interest has been nothing short of inspiring! While you eagerly wait for more details, here are a few key activities you can start to get ready.

• Run a holistic Analytics Strategy workshop: sap.com/bistrategy
• Establish your data strategy with an Information Governance Assessment workshop. http://infogovtool.sap.com
• Get ready for the newest innovations by upgrading to BI 4.2. Schedule a BI Upgrade Technical workshop
• Register for the Lumira Newsletter
• Stay tuned to this space for a sweet set of blogs on Lumira 2.0
• Check out tutorial videos on YouTube and SCN
• Check out the roadmap on sap.com: sap.com/roadmaps