As you’ve probably heard by now, SAP Visual Intelligence has been renamed to SAP Lumira (you can find the announcement and FAQ here) and you can buy a copy online.
We know that this decision is likely to be met by some eye-rolling from our faithful customers who are still recovering from previous changes (e.g. Xcelsius changing to SAP Dashboards).
The bottom line: we know that there are downsides to such a change, and despite the inevitable disruption it may cause, we feel it’s the right choice. Here are some of the key reasons that tipped the balance:
Family Ties. As we announced in a web cast earlier this week, the next version of SAP Visual Intelligence (sorry, SAP Lumira) will offer tight integration with SAP’s next-generation cloud BI platform, SAP Lumira Cloud (along with lots of other great new features). We feel that it’s more appropriate to use a completely new name for a completely new “network of truth” approach to business intelligence and analytics (and “SAP Visual Intelligence Cloud” sounds clunky).
Searching and Sharing. SAP Lumira is a more human-friendly yet Google-ready name. As with SAP HANA (which trips off the tongue more easily than “SAP's new platform for real-time analytics and applications”), a distinctive name makes it easier to find relevant materials (it’s one of the reasons we took the space out of “Business Objects” many years ago).
And with community becoming increasingly important, this change should ultimately make it easier to find the information you need to deploy and use the products successfully (but no, this doesn't mean that Xcelsius is coming back, even if the logic is the same.)
There’s Never a Good Time. Yes, it would have been better to have the right name from the start, but what can we say? Although BI has been around for a long time, we believe that analytic users are still a minority. SAP Lumira aims to change that by making it easier than ever to get powerful, self-service business intelligence into the hands of everyone. We believe it is destined for greatness, and it’s less painful to make the switch now than later.
If you’re reading this, you’re probably one of the people that know and use our products, and we’re very grateful. We know that changing names is disruptive, not only for you but for the business people in your organization that use our products to get insight.
We’re eager to help you make the change as smooth as possible. We know you have lots of questions, and we'll be explaining a lot more in the presentations next week at SAPPHIRE NOW, which you can also watch online. Please let us know what we can do to help by taking part in the discussions in this SCN area -- or commenting on this blog post!
And we’d like your help to get the word out about the changes to the rest of the world (#SAPVisi is dead! Long live #SAPLumira!).
PS. I wouldn’t bother looking for other things called Lumira – it’s the first thing we did ourselves, and we didn’t find anything interesting… :smile:
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