SAP kicked off its Sapphire Now conference in Orlando yesterday by combining Big Data, blockchain, Internet of Things (IoT), and machine learning (ML) tools in a revamped SAP Leonardo suite built on the SAP Cloud Platform. Today, the company followed up by announcing a host of updates, partnerships, and new technologies centered on analytics and business intelligence (BI).
The updated analytics portfolio adds greater data visualization capabilities, and launches new tools and services in SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP S/4HANA around ML and predictive analytics. Mike Flannagan, Senior Vice President of Analytics at SAP, told PCMag that the company aims to give businesses a single dashboard view from which to oversee IT infrastructure. On top of that, SAP is bolstering its selection of real-time tools to manage and analyze an increasingly complex array of data sources and hybrid deployments.
"Hybrid is becoming a really big topic for customers who have assets both in the cloud and on-premises. Managing all of that is a constant trick," said Flannagan. "The new SAP Analytics Hub integrated with cloud infrastructure is a way for IT to get a single view of all their analytics assets, regardless of whether they're sitting in our cloud or another vendor's system."
The company also announced SAP Digital Boardroom support for the Microsoft Surface Hub, and a partnership with ZoomData on enhanced data visualization. Here's a breakdown of all the Day Two announcements at SAP Sapphire Now:
- SAP Analytics Cloud: Formerly known as SAP BusinessObjects Cloud, SAP is rolling out an update this month to SAP Analytics Cloud, including a new iOS application, live connections to SAP BW/4HANA and Universes databases, added scripting for the R statistical programming language, and enhanced visual linking. There will also be new data preparation functions and new "smart discovery and insight" features, including simulations and scoring and prebuilt data visualization recommendations.
- SAP Analytics Hub: A new offering designed for business users to search analytics content across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments.
- SAP and IBM: SAP's Ariba cloud B2B marketplace is partnering with IBM to build intelligent apps using SAP Leonardo and IBM Watson using real-time data from Ariba.
- SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.2: Improved user interface (UI) experiences with the new Web Intelligence Unified Viewer and the enhanced Fiori-style BI Launchpad.
- SAP Cloud Platform Predictive Services: New features such as recommendation and clustering models as well as model training services for automated regression and classification.
- SAP Digital Boardroom: Added support for Microsoft Surface Hub.
- SAP IT Operations Analytics 2.0: Updated with new IT incident response features incorporating business impact insights as well as hybrid data center resource management tools.
- SAP Lumira 2.0: A new version of the data visualization software combining Lumira visualizations and SAP Design Studios for IT and business users.
- SAP Predictive Analytics: Enables ML in SAP S/4HANA apps both on-premises and in the cloud. The company plans to release additional data management and insight features.
- Thrive Global: SAP expands its partnership with Arianna Huffington-backed corporate wellness startup Thrive Global to develop personalized surveys and an "integrated, well-being solution" for employees based on SAP SuccessFactors.
- ZoomData Partnership: Designed to enhance SAP Lumira's available data source as well as analytics and visualization capabilities.
Flanagan broke down a few of the most significant announcements. He explained why the ZoomData partnership is important, and how SAP thinks its new analytics offerings can disrupt established BI and data visualization vendors. "Our visualization tools for Big Data and real-time streaming data are big," said Flannagan. "ZoomData is doing a demo onstage at Sapphire that will show off some cool stuff you can do with the Lumira 2.0 client that they can't do with Tableau.
"On the IT Operations Analytics [ITOA] front, we think customers on SAP S/4HANA can now do more with real-time data altering in their IT infrastructure that can actually scale. We replaced Splunk internally because it couldn't scale to the volume we needed, and we think SAP ITOA 2.0 can help tools like Splunk either scale better or replace them entirely."