Today at SAPPHIRE NOW, SAP announced new analytics innovations for the intelligent enterprise. The analytics portfolio provides customers with enhancements across SAP Analytics to gain insights and predict outcomes in the cloud, on premise, and in a hybrid approach.

These analytics innovations follow the announcement yesterday of SAP Leonardo, which will combine machine learning, Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain, analytics, and Big Data on an open digital platform. This comprehensive digital innovation system will offer customer industry-specific services, called SAP Leonardo industry accelerator packages, for digital transformation with fixed prices and timelines.

We are excited to provide customers continuous innovations for analytics to stay simple with on-premise innovations for SAP Lumira, SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.2, and SAP BW/4HANA. Organizations can always stay ahead with enhancements to SAP Predictive Analytics, SAP IT Operations Analytics, and SAP Cloud Platform Predictive service. And customers can take action in the moment with SAP Analytics Cloud (formerly SAP BusinessObjects Cloud) and SAP Digital Boardroom.

SAP continues to deliver world-class analytics solutions and we are pleased to provide a summary of the analytics innovations featured at SAPPHIRE NOW, with further information provided in each solution area.

Cloud Innovations

• SAP Analytics Cloud combines all analytics capabilities into one software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, brings a host of new product innovations for live connectivity, mobile UX, and pre-built analytical content. New data connectors offer live connectivity to SAP BusinessObjects Universes, SAP BW/4HANA, and SAP S4/HANA. Additional data connections are also available for Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift, and SAP applications such as SAP SuccessFactors and SAP Hybris. The analytics team will also preview new mobile UX for SAP Analytics Cloud, which is planned to be available to customers on iOS in June.
• SAP Digital Boardroom, a solution for supervisory, executive, and operational management built on SAP Analytics Cloud extends support to Microsoft Surface Hub and delivers pre-packaged analytic content for lines of business and industries from SAP and partners.
• SAP Cloud Platform Predictive services provide a platform to deploy robust predictive capabilities directly into cloud applications. New features include recommendation and clustering models, as well as model training services for automated regression and classification.

Hybrid Innovations

• Agile data discovery solution SAP Lumira delivers the next wave of innovation and continues SAP’s BI solution use case convergence, bringing simplicity to BI customers. With planned availability in summer 2017, SAP Lumira 2.0 brings together visualization and data preparation available today with SAP Lumira Designer, the SAP solution for IT and developers to build analytical applications. SAP is also teaming up with Big Data analytics software maker Zoomdata to allow customers to leverage access to modern Big Data sources, data lakes, streaming data, and other NoSQL data sources. The intention is for Zoomdata and SAP Lumira to enable customers to innovate new use cases across transactional systems, streaming, media, and sensors. (Join a spotlight session featuring this solution on Thursday, May 17.)
• Modern BI suite SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.2 delivers improved user interface with unified viewer for SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence and enhanced SAP Fiori-styled BI Launchpad with latest update (SP4). Customers can take advantage of hybrid data scenarios with new live connectivity for SAP BusinessObjects Universes with SAP Analytics Cloud. Keeping their data on premise, users can access UNX models to apply data preparation, visualizations, and other analytic functionality with SAP Analytics Cloud.
• To assist customers dealing with multiple analytics solutions and data silos, SAP Analytics Hub provides customers a way to manage all analytics content across the organization. The solution intends to provide users with access to their favorite analytic content — SAP or third-party — and encourage adoption of analytics-based decision making throughout the organization.
• Enhancements to SAP Predictive Analytics bring advanced analytics solution and machine learning to SAP S/4HANA apps both on-premise and in the cloud, enhanced SAP HANA support, and data preparation.
• SAP IT Operations Analytics, an analytics and issue resolution solution for IT departments, now offers hybrid data center scenarios and gives IT departments more data schemas in the master data plugin, as well as new streaming data adapters and access to multiple agents.

Continue reading for further detail around the analytics innovations at SAPPHIRE NOW.

SAP Analytics Cloud

Bi-weekly innovation cycles offer customers an extensive set of new capabilities with SAP Analytics Cloud, formerly SAP BusinessObjects Cloud. Enhancements include live data connectivity to SAP BW/4HANA, SAP BusinessObjects Universes data models (UNX), SAP S4/HANA and SAP S4/HANA Cloud. This innovation allows customers to take a hybrid approach to analytics, leaving the data where it is and bringing the analytics capabilities of SAP Analytics Cloud to their data. This also allows customers to extend their existing SAP investments in analytics. Enhanced connectivity is also available for data sources such as Google BigQuery, Redshift, and SAP SuccessFactors Workforce Analytics.

A unified mobile experience will allow SAP Analytics Cloud users to consume analytics on the go. The responsive UX ensures that visualizations seamlessly adjust themselves on different screen sizes. Previewed at SAPPHIRE NOW, a new mobile app for iOS is planned for June.

In addition, new smart assist technology, which enables machine learning capabilities and automatically identifies business drivers, forecasts values, simulates KPIs, and provides insights in the form of charts and natural language, making data wrangling more efficient with smart transformations. A new R-visualization feature gives users access to a large set of open-source algorithms and visualizations.

• Try SAP Analytics Cloud for free at www.sapanalytics.cloud
• See how Live Oak Bank is making faster, better decisions with real-time information using SAP Analytics Cloud.

Workflows are also being improved with the latest release of SAP Analytics Cloud. Customers can now leverage prepackaged content for lines of business and industries to quickly create best-in-class analytical content. Built on SAP Analytics Cloud, SAP Digital Boardroom provides total transparency with new packages for supervisory board, executive, and operational management. SAP Digital Boardroom also provides enhanced support for device types and will be showcased on Microsoft Surface Hub and new Prysm devices at SAPPHIRE NOW.

• Hear firsthand from SAP executive board members Luka Mucic and Stefan Ries use SAP Digital Boardroom to gain full visibility into all aspects of their business in real time.
• Learn how COOP Mineraloel is using SAP Digital Boardroom to make informed decisions and ensure clear, transparent KPIs across regions in real time.

SAP Lumira 2.0

The 2.0 release of SAP Lumira release helps to simplify the landscape for both IT and business users and provide organizations to accelerate analytics to all lines of business with new interoperability, UX enhancements, and improved support for SAP BW and SAP BusinessObjects BI platform. SAP Lumira 2.0 is available to customers in pre-release via SAP Service Marketplace with general availability planned for summer 2017.

SAP Lumira 2.0 delivers convergence of self-service data discovery and the creation of interactive dashboards and analytic applications, bringing SAP Lumira and SAP Lumira Designer together into a single solution. An enhanced user experience enables business users to rapidly prototype and promote their insights to IT for collaborative enrichment. Innovations also provide optimized real-time access to governed data in SAP BW, SAP HANA, and SAP BusinessObjects Universes, and natively operates on SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform, providing proven scalability and data governance for all lines of business.

Complementing nearly 400 analytic extensions from SAP partners, SAP and Zoomdata are teaming up to bring an extension for real-time modern Big Data sources and streaming data. Previewed at SAPPHIRE NOW this week, the extension uses Zoomdata and SAP Lumira to provides insight across transactions (ERP and CRM data), interactions (web logs and social media), and observations (sensors and IoT), driving new and innovative use cases for SAP users.

• Learn how customers like Velux and State of Indiana is using SAP Lumira for agile data discovery and scaling to all lines of business to innovate without constraints.

SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.2 (SP4)

Innovations with SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.2 continue SAP’s commitment to simplifying, enhancing, and enriching customer experience for modern analytics. Enhancement include BI Launchpad with an SAP Fiori-style user experience and improvements to CMS access and SAP HANA data access. Popular ad hoc query solution SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence brings a new interactive viewer and additional visual and data access enhancements.

• Learn how award winning customer Mercy Health is using SAP BusinessObjects BI to reduce costs and improve patient care.

SAP Analytics Hub

SAP Analytics Hub provides SaaS-based capabilities that aim to address the challenge of limited analytics adoption, proliferation of multiple analytic solutions, and data silos. Previewed at SAPPHIRE NOW, SAP Analytics Hub intends to empower more business users to make better decisions with the right analytics available to the right user at the right time.

SAP Analytics Hub simplifies access to analytic solutions across the organization and recommends the best analytics to fit user needs. Users can browse through visual cues to uncover analytics they did not know and immediately find analytics with a homepage personalized for them. Built on SAP Cloud Platform, the solutions aim to centralize access to all analytics from SAP and third-party applications and platforms, running on premise or in the cloud.

The Brussels Intercommunal Transport Company (Société des Transports Intercommunaux de Bruxelles, STIB – Maatschappij voor het Intercommunaal vervoer te Brussel, MIVB), the first urban public transportation company in Belgium, is getting early insights into SAP Analytics Hub product capabilities and road map via the SAP Customer Engagement Initiative program.

“We were very pleased with the immediate results SAP Analytics Hub delivered to our business. After a fast rollout, we could leverage years of investments in business intelligence that had been hidden from sight all this time,” said Rob Roemers, manager, Business Intelligence Solutions, STIB-MIVB. “SAP Analytics Hub is an amazing solution to help uncover the value of our BI environment for the entire organization.”

SAP plans to make the offering generally available in the second half of 2017. Customers interested in adopting SAP Analytics Hub now can apply to join the dedicated SAP Early Adopter Care program. Follow product roadmap updates at www.sap.com/roadmaps.

SAP Predictive Analytics 3.2

SAP Predictive Analytics 3.2 continues to improve the user experience and simplify product architecture by bringing more capabilities into Predictive Factory, the next-generation browser-based UI for data scientists, business analysts, and IT administrators to build, deploy, and manage machine learning models. The 3.2 release of SAP Predictive Analytics includes classification, regression, and time series authoring in Predictive Factory, with no desktop install needed for basic configuration. Advanced model settings can be accessed in SAP Predictive Analytics remote assistant. With the addition of data manager support for SAP HANA views, users can build end to end workflows including data preparation, modelling, and scoring on SAP HANA views improving user self-sufficiency on SAP HANA.

SAP Cloud Platform Predictive Services

Predictive services allow developers to build, test, and run a variety of predictive models using REST-based APIs including regression, classification, key influencers, scoring equations, outliers, forecasts, recommendations, and what-if analyses. Recent innovations include enhancements to algorithm selection when building forecasting models, the addition of clustering models to group similar records, and services to train and apply automated regression and classification models.

Optimizing SAP Applications with Predictive Analytics

Enterprises can now leverage predictive analytics models directly within certain SAP applications, helping them make better decisions with information derived from machine learning on the core application data. Supported applications include:

• SAP Fraud Management: Increase accuracy of fraud alerts using predictive detection methods based on predictive models
• SAP S/4HANA Sourcing and Procurement: Enhance contract management with predicted consumption dates for each contract, allowing buyers to proactively manage suppliers

Additional SAP applications will be released with predictive capabilities over the coming months, including SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP S/4HANA on premise. Initial support will be for out of the box use cases followed by model editing and new model creation within applications.

• Learn how Cisco Systems Inc. deployed SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analytics on SAP HANA to get the deep insights needed to make critical decisions about what customers are going to buy and sell.

SAP IT Operations Analytics

With SAP IT Operations Analytics, IT can now take proactive, automated, actions to remediate or avert IT incidents. It affords analytics and a holistic single view, correlating data from disparate sources across the IT landscape, including existing monitoring tools. Augmenting the out-of-the-box predictive forecasting capabilities of SAP IT Operations Analytics with SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analytics enables customers to perform causal analysis and predictive maintenance for IT. Learn more about SAP IT Operations Analytics at SAPPHIRE NOW.

Analytics Optimized for SAP BW/4HANA

Next-generation data warehousing solution SAP BW/4HANA is optimized for SAP Analytics across the portfolio. Recent innovations provide for data tiering with the release of automated data life-cycle management. The solution also offers automatic data placement to extension nodes or NLS (SAP IQ, Hadoop). SAP BW/4HANA will also be showcasing transition tooling for customers to use when converting from SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW) powered by SAP HANA or SAP BW on any database to SAP BW/4HANA.

SAP plans to offer in-place system conversion and remote conversion pathways for SAP Business Warehouse customers.  (At SAPPHIRE NOW, stop by the SAP Data Warehousing demo pod #DP518 to learn more about this tool that is set to be released in June 2017.)

Top Analytics Customer Sessions at SAPPHIRE NOW

Be sure not to miss these customer sessions and hear how these award winning customers are reducing cost and deliver business value with analytics:

• Braun: Free Decision Making from Constraints with Hybrid Analytics
• Cisco: Revolutionize Sales Strategies Through Machine Learning
• Mercy Health: Act in the Moment with Confidence to Thrive in a Rapidly Changing World

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Disclaimer: Product illustrations may offer functionality available in future releases. Please contact your SAP representative for an overview of current offerings.