Tuesday, December 29, 2015

SAP Cloud for Analytics (project Orca)

This year SAP announced another analytical (yes, analytica!) software. Along with suite of BI products from BusinessObjects family accompanied with original SAP BW tools (BEx family) plus new products like Lumira looks there is still room to fill up.

The product which resulted from project code name Orca is called SAP Cloud for Analytics. It is software-as-a-service (SaaS) type of product that redefines analytics by providing all analytics capabilities, for all users, in one product.

What is this new analytics offering about? Idea behind is to have single analytics products which combines multiple analytics products and which is built on SAP's HANA Cloud Platform (HCP). The single product is intended to be used by all users within an organization. They can use it to explore all analytical capabilities like Business Intelligence (BI), planning, predictive, Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC), etc. For example planning capability in the SAP Cloud for Analytics is leveraged by SAP Cloud for Planning which was released earlier in 2015. Other capabilities will be adding into the offering soon.

How the SAP Cloud for Analytics differs from BI cloud offerings of other providers? The SAP claims that it does provide both BI and planning function in one product whereas competitors only provide single or reduced capabilities like BI or Planning but not both.

How this offering of SAP will influence their other products? Similar SaaS solution of SAP (Lumira – cloud edition) will merge with the SAP Cloud for Analytics. Similarly SAP Cloud for Planning is now part of SAP Cloud for Analytics. Other products (SAP BusinessObjects 4.x) will not be influenced.

As a side note there is one funny thing within an announcement of the SAP Cloud for Analytics. SAP actually announced it sooner than it was planned. It happened because an Amazon also introduced their analytics product – space needle. The SAP wanted to use same momentum Amazon has created in the field of analytics products.

More information:
SAP announces new product that redefines analytics in the cloud

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