R - A Cool Guy with Serious Thoughts on Enterprise Technology

I got to know this cool guy 'R' who is an expert in telling you how disruptive technologies and new business models can impact the enterprise. I guess this is the kind of guy a lot of big organizations need to engage with before embarking on a serious of new technology adoptions. And not directly engage with Products vendors who is more bias in their own offerings.

Hi R,

I stumbled on your very good blog at http://blog.softwareinsider.org and here’s my POV.

Firstly, many organizations are still not mature in terms of BI and how it can really bring in the ROI. They started with BW as the backend and Bex query, Analyzer and WAD as the frontend. Initially dashboard is not that impressive when it was deployed from WAD so BO come into place with Xcelsius. Although Xcelsius can produce some impressive features, it is not really integrated with BW objects as compared to WAD and maintenance is very high. Most time was spent to develop the dashboards rather than looking into the data and business values. Over the next couple of months , we started to hear about Project Zen which eventually become Design Studio that looks something like WAD but with more features such as HTML5 and mobile integration (MOBI). We also have Advanced Analysis and BO Explorer that can directly consume data from HANA model.

As we continue with the technology advancement, we start to hear about Lumira as a Visual Storytelling tool. It is bundled in SAP HANA license so having HANA is mandatory. Lumira can produce very fast and interactive self-service dashboard when it consume directly from HANA model. But wait, remember in Gartner Magic Quadrant we have Tableau that rank the highest in data visualization and BI space. And even SAP has plug-ins ready for HANA to be consumed directly in Tableau. So there goes another debate for some companies, Lumira or Tableau.

Apart from that, not to mention there is also EPM tool for some power users who access the financial consolidation report. Imagine what the user will be getting when he opens his Excel early in the morning – he sees Bex Analyzer for reports which is not migrated yet , Advanced Analysis  for new reports and EPM for Consolidation and Planning reports. They also have the web based reports in BO portal (Webi and Xcelsius), self-service reports in BO Explorer and some old WAD and Bex reports in Enterprise Portal. In real life scenario, when we introduce new technologies, it does not happen in a clean cut manner but  through  gradual adoption and migration. All these incur cost and time. At the end, the management will ask the questions, is there any alternative besides getting in HANA, BO, Lumira etc. As for end users, they will be confused with so many tools they need to adopt.

On the application development site, how HANA become a game changer is through SAP River and Eclipse platform. So imagine data consume directly from HANA straight into web application layer on Eclipse using SAP River, what is the ‘new’ direction for application development now ? Do we shift from SAP platform to Eclipse platform now? Webdynpro ,workflow and ABAP to JAVA & SQL?

When HANA model become the major part of data acquisition for all the tools above, no doubts HANA Studio is going to be the new ‘RSA1’. And guess what, many BW developers out there are struggling to get a project that can give them the opportunity to pick up skills in HANA Studio.

In terms of BI, it is not only about technology advancement but also about the governance of data quality in the organization. So when the technology advances, most companies still struggle with the data quality or sap ECC convergence into global instance. To have a successful BI, these two main factors has to complement each other and be executed at the right track by the right party in the holistic BI roadmap.

Ok, back to real questions – HANA, so what does all these has to do with HANA and the direction? Simple. All of the new technology and tools are geared towards the HANA platform. It does not only change the company BI strategies but the People, Process , Innovation Trends and Jobs . So you can see now how big the impact is to the world out there with the new direction.

There you have it my POV. I am more on an enthusiast on the whole SAP BI innovations and how it evolves over the time, keen to gain and share and learn from feedbacks and POV from expert like you!