SAP has been recognized as a Visionary in the 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms

[taudas]

On March 22, Gartner released the 2022 Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms[1]. I’m pleased to share that SAP has been recognized as a Magic Quadrant Visionary in this market based on its Completeness of Vision (horizontal axis) and Ability to Execute (vertical axis). SAP was recognized based on its flagship analytics and business intelligence (ABI) solution: SAP Analytics Cloud. A reprint of the Magic Quadrant report can be accessed here (registration might be required). I'm writing this article to echo Gartner analysts’ perspective on SAP Analytics Cloud and briefly recap the business value that SAP customers realizes with it.

Complete solution for BI, augmented/predictive analytics, and planning

SAP Analytics Cloud is a complete solution that uniquely provides business intelligence (BI), augmented and predictive analytics, and enterprise planning in one modern solution built for SaaS. It meets the diverse needs of all types of roles and decisions, and it allows businesspeople to analyze both the past and present while planning for the future in one experience. They make better, more informed decisions and act faster, with confidence, thanks to analytics/BI and planning in one place versus needing to stitch together separate apps for analytics/BI and planning. Watch this short video and discover how SAP Analytics Cloud connects people and plans across the enterprise to make extended planning and analysis (xP&A) a reality for better business outcomes.

SAP Analytics Cloud offers the right combination of human creativity that is required to design and produce impactful analytics content, and machine intelligence that helps to quickly and automatically uncover hidden insights, eliminate bias and anticipate the future. Watch this short demo video to see augmented analytics for businesspeople in action.

SAP Analytics Cloud also adds built-in “what if?” simulation functionality to the integration of BI, augmented/predictive analytics, and planning. At a time when the COVID-19 pandemic has challenged decision-making based on historical data and familiar approaches that are now less reliable than they were before, “what if” simulation in SAP Analytics Cloud enables all analytics/BI users to model a range of scenarios to understand the impacts of their choices and inform a wider range of decisions.

Browse more information about BI, augmented/predictive analytics, and planning in SAP Analytics Cloud.

Contextual analytics with SAP data and analytics solutions

2022 marks SAP’s 50-year anniversary since its founding in 1972. SAP customers now generate 87% of total global commerce ($46 trillions) and SAP data is the most valuable data, created from the most important business processes and informing the most impactful business decisions. SAP’s 50 years of experience as a leader in enterprise application software, helping companies of all sizes and in all industries run at their best, reminds us of something that the tech industry, always in the pursuit of novelty, too often forgets: innovation and insight come first from a deep understanding of your business in context. The new technologies we all want to work with, work best when they start from there.

Business is more demanding, and expectations are higher than ever before. Enterprises must be more intelligent, more sustainable, and more focused on serving the needs of customers, employees and society. Digital transformation is critical to this change with new technology that is promising to be faster, better, cheaper, cooler. Under these pressures there’s been a fundamental error – focusing on the technology rather than the data. In fact, data has been moved to serve the technology rather than technology brought to the data.

There is a better way to digitally transform your business, by bringing new technologies into the context-rich environment of existing business systems. SAP Analytics Cloud is part of the wider portfolio of SAP data and analytics solutions, within the SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), that also includes SAP HANA Cloud, SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, and SAP Data Intelligence Cloud. SAP data and analytics solutions bring together data integration, database management, planning, and analytics on a modern, open cloud architecture that makes the most out of the value of your SAP data.

Rather than disrupting governance and infrastructure, SAP provides deeper business insights. SAP data and analytics solutions, including SAP Analytics Cloud, retain the full business perspective of SAP data, up-to-date and authoritative, enabling collaborative insights and planning across the enterprise. As a result, daily tasks are more insightful, planning is more confident, business processes and data management are better governed. Browse more information on how you can give data purpose with SAP data and analytics solutions.

Embedded analytics and pre-packaged best practices

SAP Analytics Cloud comes with seamless native connectivity to SAP data sources and enterprise applications, including SAP BW/4HANA and SAP S/4HANA. It offers unparallel usability and performance for self-service analytics/BI and planning to all SAP application users while preserving business semantics, security, and data integrity with live queries to SAP data sources and applications.

Building upon this unique access to SAP data and applications, SAP Analytics Cloud is embedded in SAP's cloud enterprise applications, incl. SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP SuccessFactors, and SAP Ariba, to put timely, relevant decision-ready information in the hands of all businesspeople. By embedding analytics and planning into existing applications, you increase user productivity, help them make better and more confident decisions, and increase overall business efficiency.

On top of this seamless user experience with embedded analytics for SAP application users, you can also eliminate reporting silos in consolidating 360° insights across lines of business in a common user experience based on SAP Analytics Cloud. Read more about embedded analytics with SAP Analytics Cloud.

To realize more business value, faster, over 100 prebuilt business content packages are available across industries and lines of business to provide a quick and easy starting point for your individual analytics These best-practice packages include prebuilt data models, integrations, templates, and analytics that work out-of-the-box with existing and new SAP applications. Browse all content packages.

Cloud analytics

SAP’s analytics cloud-first product strategy focuses on delivering fast innovations in the cloud while continuing to support on-premise systems with hybrid analytics and enabling customers to move to the cloud at their own pace. It is well positioned for where the market is headed with cloud analytics. According to a recent Americas’ SAP Users’ Group (ASUG) survey[2]:

• 81% of respondents are planning to move their on-premise systems to the cloud


• Analytics is the top area respondents currently have in the cloud with 47% of them already running it in the cloud


• Analytics is the number one priority to move to the cloud with 31% planning to move analytics in 2022

For companies running SAP BusinessObjects BI solutions and looking to the cloud, SAP Analytics Cloud should be the starting point for new analytics projects and use cases. However, some companies cannot instantly switch their reports to SAP Analytics Cloud. They may have a significant number of legacy reports needed to run their organization or have large amounts of data for analytical modeling and reporting via SAP BusinessObjects universes. A steppingstone to SAP Analytics Cloud is SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise, private cloud edition.

The private cloud edition of SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise offers you the opportunity to move your existing on-premise deployments of SAP BusinessObjects BI to a private cloud environment managed by SAP. It’s a cloud subscription model (per user or concurrent user) that includes the software license, infrastructure cost, and operational services in one simple contract. It delivers the benefits of the cloud while letting you explore next steps to SAP Analytics Cloud through new projects or move specific use cases, departments, and so on, in a phased approach. Read more about SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise, private cloud edition, here.

A reprint of the Magic Quadrant report can be accessed here (registration might be required), enjoy your reading!

For more information on SAP Analytics Cloud, please visit www.sap.com/analytics-cloud.

 

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

GARTNER and Magic Quadrant are registered trademarks and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

[1] Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms, Austin Kronz, Kurt Schlegel, Julian Sun, David Pidsley, Anirudh Ganeshan, 22 March 2022

[2] Experiences with Cloud Solutions and Migrations, Research from ASUG and SAP, October 2021

[pbaumann]

Hello thierry.audas !

Thank you for the update! If we look into detail of the Gartner Magic Quadrant we see these strong capabilities like a not so suprising SAP connectivity but also augmented analytics and the proven business content approach.

An on-premise offering is not so important from my perspective as live connection with SAC works well, at least for many SAP customers.

But it is the lack of connectivity into the non-SAP world that is critical and in BI & Analytics connectivity is very important and would potentially help lift SAC into the not so distant leader quadrant. Currently, I assume DWC is the strategic direction here, as I have heard here: https://twitter.com/IvervandeZand/status/1505662299268599808

That may make sense from a SAP sales perspective, but is not helpful for many customers willing to use SAC on BW/4HANA or S/4HANA or others. I think hearing what the market says and not just optimizing just around the own SAP Portfolio will give a chance of growing out of the own bubble. Listen to SAP customers is helpful for sure but listen to the broader market would make SAC a strong solution not just in the SAP bubble.Otherwise SAC loose in many cases where there is more than one bigger source of relevant data as other solutions do a better job here.

Nice to see a strong roadmap with currently 107 items for SAC. But Live Connection to SQL sources in 2023 is the only non-SAP Data Integration item here... Please don't just listen to the strong points Gartner is telling you.

[IvervandeZand]

Hi pbaumann08

Thanks for your note. Very happy to hear you like our strategic direction. Of course we shared this direction with many of the Analysts and all of them respond very positively.

As far as talking live connectivity to non-SAP data sources is concerned, we indeed recommend to bring in SAP Data Warehouse Cloud (DwC).With DwC we already support live connectors to many non-SAP sources, plus we have a great roadmap to add more. SAC on it's own connects of course live to DwC and leverages DwC's connection capabilities. We therefore have no plans to add live connectors to SAC to non-SAP data sources.

SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Data Warehouse Cloud are already close related and have strong interoperability. The latter will even get stronger through the various release cycles this year (pls check both of their roadmaps)

From a product perspective it doesn't make sense to build in live connections to non-SAP data sources in all our portfolios (HANA, DwC, SAC etc). As such we have chosen SAP Data Warehouse Cloud as the central product to provide these live connections to non-SAP Sources

[pbaumann]

Hi iver.vandezand,

you are right and I understand your position. To be clear I'm a huge fan of SAP but also have some different perspectives from other vendors and would love to see more openness and not such a close coupling with two different products having there own use cases.

But from a SAP perspective I'm very happy to see a lively roadmap for SAC and DWC and am always happy to read about the news and also your regular monthly wrap-up.

 

[avsalynin]

some analytics and trends on this topic:

[pbaumann]

Thank you avsalynin!

Your heatmap shows very well the shift from traditional enterprise BI to what Gartner called modern BI and Analytics platform. Since then SAP as the other traditionell big players like SAS, IBM, Oracle and Microstretagy led here before had some issues closing the gap. Maybe a decision from product strategy in the context of the rest of the portfolio offered. It always make sense to go into the details of a solution and map to the individual needs.

Competition stimulates business and the race of innovation is hard and important, bringing BI & Analytics forward.

Nice to use BI for BI market development analysis 🙂