Recent Analytics Lessons Learned - Guideposts for Moving Forward
The pandemic has presented us all with unique and unparalleled times in all aspects of our lives – personal and business alike.
John Yuva with SAPinsider recently sat down with Timo Elliott, Vice President Global Innovation Evangelist at SAP, and Iver van de Zand, Vice President Solution & Product Management — Planning & Analytics at SAP, to discuss lessons learned during the pandemic and how SAP users can transition from SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise and leverage the power of the cloud.
The result of these conversations is featured in the article entitled,
“A New Era in Analytics: SAP BusinessObjects and Journey to the Cloud”. Here are some highlights from that piece.
Drive Toward Digital Transformation and Agility
Many companies with agile business processes and technology platforms prior to the pandemic were able to weather the storm and maintain supply chain continuity.
What was the differentiator for companies that remained competitive during a volatile and uncertain time? One word — agility. According to Elliott, companies that had already implemented some form of digital transformation and moved to the cloud were able to scale their operations. He says it’s clearer than ever that moving to the cloud provides a major opportunity for agility. Agility and digital transformation go hand in hand, van de Zand added.
For those who have yet to pursue a digital transformation, COVID-19 has made clear the risks of
not moving to a cloud environment.
SAP users can transition from SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise on-premise and leverage the power of the cloud.
Approaches to Implementing a Cloud Move
In recent years the market has seen a big shift from traditional ‘reporting’ to ‘augmented analytics’ as business users demand a next generation, self-service user experience. The ultimate go-forward solution for SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise users is SAP Analytics Cloud.
With SAP Analytics Cloud, companies have capabilities like business intelligence, predictive analytics, artificial intelligence, and planning all working together in a single solution for making fast, confident decisions. This strategy is clearly called out in our public
SAP Analytics BI Statement of Direction.
“We encourage people to use the newest approaches and consider SAP Analytics Cloud when they're doing new projects to make it as easy as possible to move from reporting to more modern data analysis,” Elliott says.
Using SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise in the Cloud
A number of SAP BusinessObjects customers have yet to move to SAP Analytics Cloud. For some, advanced reporting capabilities are heavily relied upon by their companies, with tens of thousands of legacy reports residing in their SAP BusinessObjects systems. Given the reality that some customers cannot instantly switch in some cases thousands of SAP BusinessObjects reports to SAP Analytics Cloud, there is now a route to get them started in the cloud.
SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise customers can make the first step in their journey to the cloud with
SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise, private cloud edition. Companies can maintain their business-critical reporting capabilities while moving their operations to the cloud.
“The beauty of the SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise Private Cloud Edition is that it gives companies the capabilities of taking that which they could only do on-premise before, and bring it up and run it in the cloud,” shared van de Zand.
Best of Both Worlds – A Progressive Step Towards The Future
Another approach being adopted today is to subscribe to SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise (either on-premise or in the cloud) and running them side-by-side, operating the services in parallel and then commencing a phased move to SAP Analytics Cloud over time.
This method helps enhance and build upon mission-critical reporting use cases while leveraging universes, document structures and assets in conjunction with the BI, planning, and predictive innovations provided by SAP Analytics Cloud. Live connectivity offers the chance to deliver up to the minute information for real-time insight and decisions, and share data, whether on-premise or in the cloud. Organizations can extend analytics capabilities and self-service user analysis across the entire organization with SAP Analytics Cloud.
Importantly, the cloud subscription model for SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise, private cloud edition provides a flexible commercial framework and options as usage patterns change over time. This provides SAP BusinessObjects customers with the opportunity to evaluate the value of existing assets and reports to determine whether they truly need to be moved.
Interested? Learn More Now
Feeling the need for greater agility? Give the
SAPinsider article a read for the full story. Also, check out this
overview of SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise, private cloud edition. Look at this info session for a
deeper dive on SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise, private cloud edition. Got a question or a comment? Drop us a comment below or note at
sapaskanalytics@sap.com.
