Hi, my name is Surya and I remain an addict.....of self-serve analytics solutions. I follow many self-service BI vendors very closely in the course of my job and influence enterprises in their technology buying decisions.
After a brief hiatus of a couple of weeks (don’t ask, there’s just too much work and technology in the world right now) I am back to what I love – testing/tasting analytics solutions. Today’s menu options include SAP Lumira as the main course, generous sides of SAP HANA and BI, and a cloud-y dessert tailored to your taste.
Today’s review is going to be slightly different than other solutions I have reviewed in the past. Before you jump to conclusions though, this has nothing to do with the fact that SAP Lumira’s product management team briefed me in detail about their product before this piece—no money changed hands, in case you’re wondering.
Mah Nishtanah - Why is this review different from all other reviews?
The real reason why Lumira is different is that it comes from a mega-vendor who has been in the BI/analytics world for decades. I maintain that size is not necessarily an advantage in the self-service world. However, Lumira sits in a unique place. It is a solution that has a lot to live up to—to be specific, at least 13 products from SAP do complimentary analytical things. Lumira converges use-cases, brings everyone together, greatly simplifying the SAP message and portfolio.
Bottom-line: Today’s review is going to be balanced—between traditional enterprise BI use-cases and self-service analytics use cases. Lumira is a story that needs to be told from an IT/enterprise as well as a business/personal angle.
With that out of the way, let’s get down to the key reasons you might fall in love with SAP Lumira.
#1: Data Wrangling and Data Management
Let me go ahead and polish my crystal ball first. If I had one concern about the meteoric rise of self-service solutions, it would be around data management. My forecast? Five years down the line, data wrangling and data management will be the colossal problems for self-service analytics adopters. There are two aspects to this issue. The first, simply put, starts the moment you import data inside a self-service analytics solution. Changing imported data from inside the solution seems almost impossible! After a couple of unsuccessful attempts and a few choicest adjectives, most users go back to the source (or to MS Excel) and change the data – which beats the entire purpose of using a self-service tool. If this is healthcare data you are analysing, you have already violated HIPAA and many other regulations by now. Life as an outlaw doesn’t look too distant.
The other aspect of this equation is the creation of data silos. Self-service analytic environments that don’t talk to traditional BI will end up creating one more silo of information.
Trust me, I get it.
Data cleansing is hard, messy, and ad-hoc for the most part and no business user really wants to become a data steward. However, analysing bad data is worse than analysing no data at all. Thankfully for SAP, data management is not an issue. SAP has a gazillion years of experience handling extremely complicated data issues, so the expectations of SAP Lumira are almost unfair. However, it does not disappoint. Inside the solution, you can change structured data to a reasonable extent – changing names, adding columns, calculated dimensions, and so on. You could say that you can do the same things with many other desktop analytics solutions, and you wouldn’t be completely wrong.
However, this is where the enterprise angle and the interesting bits come in. If you happen to have any of SAP’s other products, things work without a hitch. SAP’s product sprawl is not insignificant – it includes predictive analytics with InfiniteInsight, SAP business warehouses, design studio, crystal reports, et al. The point I am trying to make is that while SAP Lumira works perfectly well as a stand-alone data visualization tool, if you happen to possess other SAP applications in-house, it instantly becomes an all-encompassing analytics powerhouse.
Let me recount a recent discussion I had with a cloud BI vendor recently – if you can guess who this is, let me know in the comment section. This firm has correctly identified that the world of BI has two key tiers – one which solves enterprise-scale issues with battle-hardened dashboards and analytics, and the other, which caters to departmental users and analysts exploring data. These need not be separate areas, but they usually are. This is where SAP Lumira can make a huge difference. If your standard BI is SAP, SAP Lumira can automatically fill the data exploration and self-service gap. Easy integration between these environments ensures you don’t have a two tier data problem.
#2: The Server-Side Functionality
This is another enterprise IT driven issue, but extremely relevant for business users as well. Viral adoption and desktop analytics can only take you so far. Beyond a point, you need
- Raw server horsepower to run mission critical analytics in real-time: My reasonably endowed laptop keeps popping a blue screen when I try to push these power hungry applications
- An easy, safe, and secure way to build and share things – semantic layer included
- Most importantly, you need specialists from IT to back you up in case things break, and god knows they often do
Building a nice dashboard for 10 people is cool, but if the same dashboard needs to be published to 3000 users across your enterprise, things get very serious very soon. SAP Lumira makes a near seamless jump from being an enthusiast’s pretty graphing tool to a really serious enterprise BI tool in seconds.
The moment you have some good hardware and SAP HANA as your server environment, you can design real-time analytics, scale without compromise, and do so much more. For SAP shops, getting a SAP Lumira also means interoperability with existing SAP BI investments.
I cannot stress this point enough – it is a big deal. Organizations tend to have massive investments built up over the years in analytics which usually don’t gel well with self-service solutions. The result? Two separate analytic camps, them versus us, fight to control data, anarchy. SAP Lumira has been deliberately designed to avoid this issue
#3: Infographics
SAP provides 3 different options to build a story, as opposed to just storyboards that everyone else provides. Infographics in particular looks really interesting – it’s a punchy way to deliver analysis results. Boards and reports do similar things, but at least it’s great to have these many options.
#4: HANA Cloud
SAP offers a 1GB free trial of the SAP Lumira cloud edition which runs on the SAP HANA Cloud Platform – more available of course at a price. Having used the cloud platforms of a few other self-service analytics vendors, I can safely say that nothing even comes close to having a columnar in-memory database of the magnitude of SAP HANA at your disposal. If you wanted to, for example, run an analysis on a massive text file and find out interesting patterns, you need look no further.
#5: The Simplification
Although slightly orthogonal to today’s review, I really love the fact that SAP is simplifying around use-cases for its massive product portfolio. I am a big fan of simplistic elegance.
#6: Some Criticism
Enough said on the positives – on to the brickbats! These are some things I would desperately want SAP to do:
- Invest more on features and less on integration: Lumira has been around for a relatively long time in this market, but yet a majority of its R&D and product innovation $$ seem to be focused on making it work with SAP HANA and other parts of the SAP stack. That’s great for SAP users, but I would have liked to see them invest some more in actually developing product functionality. There could be so many more visualizations packed into that box. There could so many more methods of lowering the adoption barrier for line of business users. There could be so many ways to actually hand out vertical flavors of dashboards…you get the point.
- Build more sharing options: I’d love to see SAP get slightly more open with sharing. At this point everything feels like it’s meant for an SAP environment. Sure, there’s share by email, but do you really want to do that? Ideally, I should be able to export a data cut and someone else with Lumira should be able to open that exact same view I created – much like Tableau does with Reader.
- Revamp the community: The SAP Lumira community lacks oomph. Yes, I said it. No offense to http://scn.sap.com/, it is a really wonderful website that has been there for a long long time and has seen me through some particularly challenging client questions. However, it is just that – a website—and that too an old one. Self-service users expect a lot more, starting with a more interactive way to get their queries answered. To be fair, not many mega-vendors have figured this out.
- Name it right, the first time: Lastly, what’s with the product naming shenanigans? When you acquire a product, you have every right to paint it with the SAP brush (KXEN became Infinite Insight). However, home-grown products shouldn’t have to go through that process. I am still not sure why Visual Intelligence was thought of and then discarded, apart from SEO optimization. But hey, as long as it works…
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