Customer Visit – Sony India: Excellent & Interactive Experience

I would like to share experience of Customer visit to Sony India Software Centre Pvt. Ltd along with other SAP Colleagues. We were around 7 people from SAP from various departments under Analytics like BI, BW, Hana Modeler and IMS.

As most of us were from Development team having very limited interaction and exposure to direct customer, it was interesting for all of us interacting with customers and understanding their landscape, specific usage of SAP Analytics products, pain-points and future expectation and plans for SAP software adoption.

It was thrilling two days visit in month of May wherein Day-1 was dedicated for Sony team to share their details and Day-2 was dedicated for SAP team to showcase new products, innovation released and future roadmaps for various Analytics solutions.

Day-1: Sony India Team presentation

A day full of excitement for SAP development team directly meeting and discussing with actual users of SAP Analytics software’s by Customers. Day-1 started with team of around 10-12 people from Sony India meeting and starting discussion.

Sony India Analytics team Head started with presenting and explaining high level landscape for their East and West regions supporting various companies of Sony like Sony Mobile, Sony Pictures, etc. Sony India is taking care of almost all of these areas. They have a huge presence of SAP ERP software’s, SAP Business Warehouse systems, SAP Planning and SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence for reporting and Dash-boarding. They shared some pain points and feedbacks for usability and enhancements request per their usage and discussed how it will help them to use SAP software more efficiently. A whole day went well along with well arranged lunch and tea breaks.

Day-2: SAP team presentation

A day full of presentation by SAP development team members about recent enhancement released and future roadmap. SAP team from various departments under Analytics showcased recent enhancements and future roadmaps for areas as:

• SAP Business Warehouse on Hana
• SAP BW/4Hana
• SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.2 Web Intelligence
• SAP Lumira 2.0
• SAPBusinessObjects BI 4.2 BI Platform
• SAP Hana Web IDE

SAP Team presented enhancement for BW on Hana and way ahead for Customers to go forward with BW/4Hana to take advantages of excellent user experience, optimized and futuristic SAP BW Solutions. Sony team showed interest in moving to latest releases for SAP Business Warehouse and were excited for those. SAP BusinessObjects BI team were thrilled to present new features related to SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.2 SP04 Web Intelligence and Platform (as customer is already using latest BI4.2 SP3 release) areas and Sony team showed tremendous interest to see new WebI DHTML viewer, new Launchpad, User Experience improvements and loads of functional enhancements related to charts, functions, etc. and future roadmap towards Hybrid enablement in moving towards SAP Cloud Analytics solutions. SAP team also explained and clarified that both On-premise and Cloud solutions for Analytics will co-exists and SAP is working continuously in both direction for Simple and efficient usage by Customers. Though, customers have been using SAP Design Studio Dashboards with few issues and concern about the performance of product on BI Platform side but they were happy with the new look and feel, loads of functionality which SAP Lumira 2.0 solution is bringing which was demoed to them. They also had few queries regarding Offline and Online connectivity in same documents which was addressed by SAP experts. Then, we finally concluded discussions with customers with presentation of Hana Web IDE.