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Former Member

On Friday my colleagues and I listened in on the AllAccessSAP Webinar hosted by mico.yuk2 and ryan.goodman. I sacrificed Friday afternoon because I knew that there would be value in hearing about the 3 new kids on the block, SAP Design Studio, Predictive Analysis and Visual Intelligence….not only that but ofcourse the entertainment. The last AllAccessSAP Webinar that I listened in on was with Steve Lucas and that was entertaining – so I was definitely not going to miss this one! It’s not every day you get a chance to hear about the products and the product roadmap from the horses’ mouths (Product Managers).

Each of the Product Manager was given the opportunity to introduce their product:

Mani Srinivas(Visual Intelligence / Explorer)

  • Spoke about the full spectrum of BI data discovery and the fact that BI allows you to tell a story using data.
  • #SAPVISI covers Acquisition(various sources), Transformation(cleansing the data),Visual Analysis &Sharing
  • #SAPVISI offers easy drag and drop interface, built in self-service.
  • #SAPVISI not replacing Explorer
  • He made a really bold statement stating that it’s so easy to use you could teach yourself in 20min! I can confirm that it is really easy to use and visually appealing...check out some of the entries from the geek challenge(http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-31772).
  • Mentioned that there is a free trial version available for download. http://www.sap.com/tryvisualintelligence some resources that you can use to get more info on SAPVISI. and

Chris Gadella(Predictive Analysis),

  • BI and Predictive Analytics are viewed as  separate worlds.. SAP envisions combining them. He spoke about convergence of BI and predictive
    Analysis...strategy is built with business user in mind
  • Strategy is to empower the biz provide actionable insights & relevant to ur business)
  • Quoted a use case of a customer that uses Predictive Analytics on SAP HANA and Hadoop to provide personalised cancer treatment plan. Thought it was funny, but Jamie Oswald even mentioned on twitter "Took 22 minutes to hear #SAPHana. May be record for 2012" #AllAccessSAP

Ian Mayor (Dashboards, SAP Design Studio)

What really caught my eye&ear though was the info ian.mayor had to offer on Dashboards and Design Studio. I had the opportunity to play around with the tool during the workshop hosted by ingo.hilgefort at Mastering SAPBI in Australia and found that it had a similar feel to the Web Application Designer(WAD).

ian.mayor kicked off his intro by talking about the 3 phase long term direction of (Mobilise, Visualise and Unify SAP Dashboards(aka Xcelsius) and Design Studio. There were a lot of questions around whether SAP Dashboards& Design Studio will eventually merge into one product. There were no timelines mentioned but at least this was clarified.

The SAP Design Studio was previously known as Project Zen. The product is positioned as being the premium replacement of the Web Application Designer(WAD). It is built for designers to centrally build analytical content for desktop as well as mobile devices and allows for SAP BW and SAP HANA as datasources. Some product features:-

  • Based on HTML5, intuitive WhatYouSeeIsWhatYouGet(WYSIWYG) design environment.
  • Allows for Prototyping (using QR code you can immediately test on your mobile device.
  • It has built-in data editor – Change the view of the BEX query - shorten development time(don’t have to leave the application to change the query)
  • It offers better hierarchy handling(i..e time dependency), currency conversion, conditions/exceptions) Intuitive Filtering
    panels – easy-to-use for end users.
  • Series of templates for desktops and iPads and predefined themes. Customers to build own themes and own templates. Thescripting allows for customised scripts for the customer.
  • Tight integration to BI Platform. There was no ramp-up program went straight to GA in Nov. 2012. It was launched at Madrid.

mico.yuk2 mentioned that there would be useful to view timo.elliott’s interview on How to decide Dashboards/Design Studio?. ian.mayor’s
response during the interview..states it SIMPLY…”IF you’re on BW/HANA…go to Design Studio….if you’re using multiple sources Dashboards. Don’t rebuild…as we move forward there will be a convergance between Dashboards and Design Studio.” – this was one of the major take homes for me!

http://scn.sap.com/community/events/sapphire-now/blog/2012/11/14/analytic-dashboards-using-html5--wh...

The licensing is pretty straightforward – it’s bundled with Dashboard license. If you don’t have it, you buy the Dashboarding license which comes with both Dashboards&Design Studio.

Other resources – there is a dedicated SAP Design Studio area on SCN. You can also follow tammy.powlas , she has a few blog posts on the topic.

The Webinar was well supported by the BI community globally with an interesting twitter conversation.


The Wrap up of the Webinar was interesting, with various SAP customers/partners doing a quick report on the state of BI in their regions!
mico.yuk2 put me on the spot though and I unfortunately didn’t have a microphone. What I would have said though was that the BI Community in South Africa is alive and
vibrant. There has been great interest in SAP HANA(POCs) but with very few live implementations. A lot of BI4.0 upgrades or implementations...improving performance of dashboards and sizing still a pain point.There has however been a concern about all the different BI tools(when to use what) so the Webinar definitely cleared this up for me by describing where each product is positioned. I will definitely share the recording with the user group.

Thanks again to mico.yuk2 and ryan.goodman  for organising this…it was definitely a late afternoon well spent!

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