In this blog, I would like to focus on providing you with a background and direction of SAP BusinessObjects Lumira 2.0, with a focus on its benefits for Data, People, and Process for analytics. And then I’ll give you an idea of what’s next.
Background
A year ago, when we were planning for the next release of SAP BusinessObejcts Lumira, we had two options in front of us…
- The first was to continue with a status quo of self service and dashboard applications, and continue delivering feature enhancements.
- The second was to make fundamental changes to deliver greater value for organizations.
With input from various customers via different councils and co-innovation projects, we chose to go with the latter to address the most critical challenges customers are facing today in the mix of self service, IT authored, and Governed Analytics. TO address these challenges we determined to:
- Eliminate data silos and ungoverned extracts by delivering consistent and common data access.
- Help business users and IT work together to reduce the people silos by creating a single product with a single file format and single data access stack, yet optimized for different user personas.
- Align on one platform strategy (SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform) and one common server add-on to facilitate information delivery and access.
While doing this, we also went an extra mile to delight our existing customers currently both SAP BusinessObjects Lumira and SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio, by delivering enhancements which have been on top of the list of customer asks.
In a nutshell, SAP BusinessObjects Lumira 2.0 isn’t just a technical convergence that has been rebranded as one product. It goes beyond that, delivering new functionalities and enhancements, while bringing governed enterprise data, departmental data, people, and processes together to enable digital transformation.
Now let me provide you with some details on the new functionalities and enhancements in SAP BusinessObjects Lumira 2.0, and also touch upon why it should be THE choice of tools to stay ahead of the curve in the future, whether Digital Enterprise and/or Hybrid.
SAP BusinessObjects Lumira 2.0—Beyond Convergence
With SAP BusinessObjects Lumira 2.0, we’re delivering the discovery component and the designer component along with the SAP BusinessObjects Lumira Server for BI platform 2.x (See this
blog for more details).
This single technology framework supports common visual components, common data access, interoperability between all three components and a significantly improved UX to improve the customer experience for all personas: business users, IT, and administrators.
Let’s put this into the context of Data, People and Process for Analytics.
Data
- SAP Business Warehouse Live Analysis: Deliver best-in-class experience for Business users to analyze data from SAP Business Warehouse while respecting all business logic and metadata defined in the BW layer.
- Build analytic applications on acquired (offline) data: Classic SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio users will benefit from being able to create custom analytic applications based on offline data in addition to SAP Business Warehouse and SAP HANA Live support. The designer component can now be an alternative for Xcelsius offline applications.
- SAP HANA Live Analysis: Maximize your SAP HANA investment by leveraging the common HTTP Connector to access SAP HANA views and support additional SAP HANA elements like Parent child and level-based hierarchies.
- Data-driven visual analysis: Redesigned visualizations to make it simpler for end users to start visualizing data with basic charts and extend it to complex and appropriate visualizations during the process of discovery.
People
- Interoperability: Enable casual business users and IT to work together by extending work done by each other. Business users can create a quick prototype of a dashboard using the discovery component, and then IT can complete that prototype by adding sophisticated scripting and actions in the designer component.
- More interoperability: IT can endorse SAP BusinessObjects Lumira discovery as the solution for self-service data discovery and let it grow organically, knowing that it will maximize the use of governed enterprise data and minimize the creation of ungoverned data extracts.
- User Experience: A renovated user experience for the discovery component makes data discovery simpler and contextual for business users.
- Filters & input controls: Redesigned filters and input controls make it simpler for business users to define scope of analysis and improve interactive analysis.
- Layout for dashboards and stories: Improved application layout to make story-telling easier with a re-usable dashboard and story components and responsive (relative layout) rendering for any target consumption devices.
- Personalization: Extended bookmarking capabilities support personalization of data analysis, conditional highlights, dynamic calculations, sorting and filtering.
- Application Specific: Composites to build reusable user-defined components, Adaptive Layout support different devices (small, medium & large).
Process
- Single Platform: Deep integration into the SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform. Leverage existing user and security structure, and provide a complete BI solution to users that includes ad-hoc reporting, production reporting, and Office integration.
- Mobile access: Consume SAP BusinessObjects Lumira 2.0 documents using the Mobile BI app, which includes support for offline discovery documents with extended visualization and analysis support.
- Single add-on: Reduced TCO for IT with common add-on on platform to manage and maintain for all use cases.
Please refer to the
SAP BusinessObjects Lumira Roadmap slides for additional details.
Beyond SAP BusinessObjects Lumira 2.0:
SAP BusinessObjects Lumira 2.0 is just a beginning, not an end.
It is a powerful platform for future innovations, such as:
- Smart data discovery that leverages predictive analytics and machine learning.
- Integrating your existing investments with hybrid and cloud solutions.
- Becoming a data preparation platform for all BI Platform clients.
As usual, we would love to hear your feedback on SAP BusinessObjects Lumira 2.0 and the direction to align our roadmap accordingly, to meet your expectations and keep you ahead of the curve.
If you are at ASUG Annual Conference/SAPPHIRENOW, join us at the
Interactive Influence session!
What to do next
In the next months, you’ll be hearing many more details on SAP BusinessObjects Lumira. Here’s how you can stay up-to-date:
