When SAP Visual Intelligence was first renamed to SAP Lumira, it was mainly a change in name only. Most of the capabilities stayed fairly similar, as it primarily marked a shift in direction for SAP. pierre.leroux tackled that, and other questions on Lumira in an article written in May of 2013.
Since then, the growth of the solution has ramped up, recently moving from SP 11 to SP12. Before a lot of people had downloaded SP12, SP13 was being released. The changes have been coming fast and furious, and there is a rumoured release of SP14 being ready before the New Year. The changes have been pretty big as well. Changing from the Flash based SP11 to the HTML5 based SP12 was more like changing from 1.11.0 to 2.0. The look and feel has completely changed as well. A friendlier user experience was the aim of the development team, and they hit the mark.
With new releases coming out so quickly, there is bound to be confusion about capabilities of each version. It’s one of those confusions that I’m going to address here today.
When Lumira SP12, Personal Edition was first released in October of this year, it had the capabilities of working with Excel files, and CSV files, and that was all. We were very clear on what you could connect, and what you couldn’t. With the launch of SP13, we muddied the water a little. It’s not that we weren’t clear about the capabilities, it’s that some people took for granted that the free personal edition would pretty much stay the same…well, because it was free. The SAP Analytics team and the Lumira developers had something else in mind though. When asked about the reasoning for this, mani.srinivasan replied," the main thought behind adding HANA one to the personal edition is to provoke some interested in the HANA dev community to provide a quick visualization tool to interact with and understand the HANA data. This was provided with the intention to get these folks try out Lumira and promote it within their org."
When SP13 went GA Status, the personal addition had a surprise waiting for its’ users. The ability to connect and download with HANA One was added to the Excel and CSV formats that Lumira could work with. I emailed henry.banks to clarify that this wasn’t a trick, and that this connection was indeed available to
which he replied, “HANA One is our HANA platform, but made available to customers via a public cloud (AWS) “and is ideal for starter innovation projects” (marketing brief). It means they don’t purchase the software, nor do they host nor maintain the infrastructure – instead, they lease the product as a ‘software as a service.” He also sent a link to explain it further.
There were a lot of SAP people that missed the new addition. I was recently taking in a sales presentation on some of SAP’s analytic offerings, and Lumira was one of the solutions that were being discussed. The presenter was pretty knowledgeable about the Lumira application, versions and capabilities. He started talking about the type of files that the personal edition of Lumira worked with, “CSV and Excel….” That was it. Evidently, he too had missed the new connections available to users of the free version of Lumira. Thus, the reason for this overly lengthy blog.
I felt the need to clarify that these connection types are indeed available in the Free, Personal Edition of SAP Lumira, and that SAP is committed to developing solutions for every level of user out there, no matter what they do (or don’t) pay. The capabilities need to make sense, and adding HANA One to the Personal Edition does just that.
With the release of SP14 right around the corner, make sure you pay close attention to all the new capabilities, because you never know what you may find.
- SAP Managed Tags:
1 Comment
