2018 is already off with an interesting start. In case you missed it, SAP has announced a new statement of direction with some massive implications, and the embedded FAQ has even more nuggets. The important stuff is here:
- SAP Analytics Cloud is SAP’s focus for innovation in the area of Data Discovery.
- SAP Dashboards (the artist formerly known as Xcelsius) and SAP Explorer will reach end of life on December 31, 2020, which coincides with the end of life for Adobe Flash. We know a significant number of customers with perfectly functional and valuable solutions built in both of these tools that are in use today.
- SAP Lumira Discovery will receive improvements and some customer-driven enhancements in 2018 through SAP Lumira 2.2 and 2.3, but there is no other planned innovation. SAP Lumira Discovery will end of life in 2024. Customers already live, or are going live, are being guided by SAP that this is still a valid investment of your resources for the task of data discovery.
- The use of other tools in the SAP BI Suite such as Web Intelligence, Crystal Reports, Lumira Designer/Design Studio, etc., are still considered supported with an enhancement and extended support roadmap. Enhancing these tools will also help shed light on the popular kibana vs grafana debate.
- Support for SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.1 ends at the end of 2018. It’s time to think about an upgrade to BI 4.2.
We have the honor and pleasure of supporting many customers with both their SAP and non-SAP tool use strategies. In our nine years as a data and analytics consultancy, we’ve observed the shift of many customers towards a multi-tool use strategy. That doesn’t necessarily mean just different vendors, but also hybrid cloud/on premise solutions as well. We work together on the technical aspects like systems, tools, and development, as well as the non-technical aspects like tool selection, governance, and more.
For those of you in buckets two or three above, you have profoundly difficult decisions to make. To quote an old friend again, “you can retire tools, but you cannot retire content”. Your business partners have an expectation to have the information at their fingertips to run your businesses. Today might be the day we need to crack the conversation open together to discuss where to invest your precious time and resources. We’re here to help.
- First and foremost, as an SAP partner we plan to be at the forefront of SAP’s strategic direction and provide our customers unmatched technical leadership with SAP Analytics Cloud, SAP Analytics Hub, SAP HANA and SAP Cloud Platform. We always have been, we always will be.
- Second, we will continue to help our customers optimize the SAP BusinessObjects BI platform, with rock-solid on-premise installations or cloud-based installations from supported hosts such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.
- We will continue to innovate with Sherlock™, our SAP certified solution, bringing enhancements that help customers adopt go-forward technologies such as SAP Analytics Hub and UNX universes. We’ll also bring new features that help customers replatform business-critical systems that rely on soon-to-be-obsolete Adobe Flash-based technologies such as Explorer and Xcelsius Dashboards.
- Lastly, for customers with best-of-breed multi-vendor analytics strategies, we aim to be your data and analytics partner, not just your SAP analytics partner.
Please comment below, or contact us and our trusted team of nerds will huddle up with you and help you develop that plan.