This post is brought to us by Symmetry Corporation.
SAP HANA® gets a lot of attention for its blazing speed, but from a business perspective, raw power is never the most important consideration. Even HANA’s advanced analytic and real-time business intelligence are only as valuable as the insights companies can draw from them. And valuable insights require intuitive, mobile apps designed around the needs of the user — not the structure of the backend.
When SAP Fiori was launched, it showed that SAP understood the importance of excellent UX, and the growing importance of mobile devices for business users. Its innovative interface replaces archaic desktop menus with natural workflow, in a product that’s as attractive as it is functional.
Superficially, while SAP’s SAPPHIRE NOW 2016 BusinessObjects announcement may seem like a rebranding, the product will prove every bit as innovative as Fiori. By providing BusinessObjects as a complete business intelligence (BI) suite, SAP has taken another major step toward in helping businesses harness the power of SAP HANA.
The SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2016 Keynote Address: Revealing the Future
SAP has sometimes been criticized for not being clear enough about its product offerings. As Gartner Research VP Cindi Howson put it, “BI and analytics is all I do, and yet, even for me, it’s a tough road map to keep track of.” At SAPPHIRE NOW, SAP CEO Bill McDermott directly addressed this criticism, pledging to make SAP more responsive to customers, with clearer product roadmaps and migration guidelines. But in that same speech, he emphasized the central role of design thinking that puts the end user experience above everything
“We feel strongly that design thinking and innovation is the way forward. So we truly have to understand that with every encounter with our customers means we have to understand their customers. We have to make the world run better, we have to improve people’s lives one customer at a time and that’s the commitment I give to you today.”
Offering analytics in a single package will certainly help SAP provide clearer roadmaps, and alleviate customer frustration. But how does SAP BusinessObjects help the end user?
Inside SAP BusinessObjects
SAP has combined all of its analytics into one tool in two main versions: BusinessObjects Cloud (formerly SAP Cloud for Analytics), and the on-premise version — BusinessObjects Enterprise. The enterprise version is offered in standard, pro and premium configurations, giving businesses the ability to select what features they need.
SAP BusinessObjects Cloud is a complete BI package, addressing everything from data curation through planning. For the first time, customers can get all their enterprise analytics in a single package — including modeling, visualization and mobile analytics.
Their mobile offerings are where things get innovative. SAP has included recently-acquired Roambi, a mobile-first app featuring beautiful visualizations, rendered on the fly to help users quickly draw the right conclusions from complex datasets.
Likewise, end users are about to get a lot more in light of another SAP SAPPHIRE NOW announcement: the partnership with Apple. By working together to offer an SDK, training and an iOS version of Fiori, the companies will accelerate the development of iOS Apps with SAP backend, leading to better mobile analytics.
SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2016 is the start of a new age of end-user experience.
Often, learning how to make the most of a new invention is an even bigger challenge than inventing it. Now it’s up to designers and developers — supported by the cloud SAP hosting professionals who make everything work together on the backend — to show the world just how good SAP HANA can be.