SAP’s strategy for the intelligent enterprise enables customers to bring applications, a digital platform, and intelligent technologies together to thrive in the digital economy.

Analytics are the window into an intelligent enterprise, providing the foundation for insightful action to deliver value across the business. We are excited to announce new analytics innovations at SAPPHIRE NOW that make analytics easy with smart insights and deliver modern innovation in the cloud.

Bringing Analytics Together

SAP Analytics Cloud brings together all analytics for business intelligence (BI), planning, and predictive capabilities on one cloud native solution. What’s new today are the planning and analysis capabilities in SAP Analytics Cloud directly embedded within SAP S/4HANA Cloud. This ensures organizations can plan, execute, and analyze in one financial management system that helps align operational plans with financial results and break-free from standalone spreadsheets or disconnected planning-only tools. The integration of planning and analysis spans other applications, such as SAP SuccessFactors solutions, to further embed insights into SAP’s intelligent suite. Manufacturing customer Pratt brings these innovations into action with faster planning and analysis cycles using SAP Analytics Cloud.

Customers currently using SAP Business Planning and Consolidation can extend the value of their existing investments by leveraging the innovations with SAP Analytics Cloud in a hybrid architecture for integrated planning across on premise and cloud. Innovations with SAP Analytics Cloud in this area provide planning users with enhanced modeling, workflow, and access to natural language queries.

As many organizations today operate in a mixed landscape across on-premise and cloud technology, they continue to look for the best path forward in this hybrid world. In a recent research study with leading organizations, 88 percent of respondents reported that they regard hybrid analytics/BI platforms as important to their company and 60 percent are already using a hybrid strategy for their analytics and data. L3 Technologies embraces hybrid analytics to aggregate data across all lines of business to accelerate its business objectives; discover how your organization can drive business growth with hybrid analytics.

SAP Analytics is focused on combining on-premise and cloud analytics into a hybrid solution that leverages the strengths of both platforms. For example, SAP Analytics Hub offers a single front-end for all analytic assets, whether on premise or cloud, including SAP or third-party content. Now SAP Analytics Hub has enhancements for user experience (UX), mobile, and customization features to support customers as they manage analytic content and data across hybrid landscapes.

Over the next quarter, we intend to provide further details on the product roadmap for SAP BusinessObjects BI innovations, including planned service pack releases in 2018 andthe release of SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.3 in 2019. These projected product roadmap updates aim to extend maintenance and support for SAP BusinessObjects BI customers well beyond 2024 and provide initial transition support of SAP Lumira, designer edition, content to SAP Analytics Cloud.

Recent data warehousing innovations include SAP BW/4HANA FP8 with integration of SAP Data Hub, data tiering optimization, query performance, GDPR compliance, and UX enhancements. SAP manufacturing customer Mercedes-Benz Sales Organization Germany supports sales and distribution to increase revenue with price optimization using SAP Analytics and SAP BW/4HANA.

Make Analytics Easy

SAP is committed to bringing context-rich analytics to your data, wherever it may reside. Using SAP Cloud Platform Open Connectors, SAP Analytics Cloud customers gain access to more than 150 cloud data connections for applications such as Salesforce, NetSuite, Sage, ServiceNow, Microsoft Dynamics, Marketo, SugarCRM, and Zendesk to allow customers to easily access, blend, and gain insight from their data.

Product innovations with SAP Analytics Cloud make it easy for organizations to securely access live information for cloud and on-premise data models such as the SAP BusinessObjects Universe, SAP BW, SAP BW/4HANA, SAP S/4HANA, and SAP HANA. Only SAP can provide secure high-performing analytics using live access to on premise data without moving your data to the cloud.

SAP customer HarrisLogic is using advanced analytics to build data-driven clinical support solutions to help healthcare customers improve care to at-risk patients. New innovations today in the area of advanced analytics include smart insights using natural language queries to simply ask a question and be provided contextual insight on your device. These powerful capabilities provide an easy entry point for analytics and expand use cases throughout organizations by making it simple to query information and be rewarded with rich context and insight instantly. These enhanced capabilities in SAP Analytics Cloud for smart prep and discovery, smart grouping, time series forecasting, smart transformations, and smart search can be embedded into line-of-business applications to enable the intelligent enterprise.

Modern Innovation in the Cloud

SAP Innovation Award winner Kaiserwetter provides transparency of renewable energy investments to minimize risk and maximize return. Like many other customers, the company takes advantage of bi-weekly feature updates to SAP Analytics Cloud, which bring enhancements for APIs, business logic, and pre-built content for more than 20 SAP applications and industry solutions, including SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Ariba, SAP Hybris, and SAP S/4HANA, to embed insight into everyday decisions. Recent content enhancements include compliance reporting, manufacturing, trade management, and industry content for banking, insurance, real estate management, rural sourcing management, and embedded content with Task Manager from SAP Concur, a workflow management solution for travel management companies.

Supporting the intelligent enterprise ecosystem, SAP Analytics Cloud delivers contextual news feeds from Dow Jones to provide industry-leading data, news, and analytics from more than 8,600 content sources. In addition, new infrastructure enhancements for AWS offer flexibility and scalability options for customer deployments to meet business requirements now and in the future.

SAP is working in collaboration with SAP Digital Boardroom and Cisco’s Webex Board to provide all-analytics on an all-in-one device to intelligently connect your organization. This combined solution, delivered by SAP and Cisco partner CenturyLink, allows customers to leverage existing investments to share insights across geographically spread locations using collaborative markup features and seamless transitions across tablets and Webex boards.

A Vision for End-to-End Analytics and Data Management

Organizations that provide people with the insights they need to make better decisions and act will disrupt and deliver new growth and innovation. As we share our vision for the intelligent enterprise, SAP will preview new innovations that bring data warehousing capabilities to the cloud alongside SAP HANA Data Management Suite, including SAP Data Hub and SAP Analytics Cloud. This vision will empower SAP customers with intelligent data warehousing, data harmonization, and end-to-end analytics use cases. By doing this, customers can tightly link analytics with business process semantics and logic to reduce cost, minimize risks, and increase the value of analytics with deeper understanding of all their business in real time and more trusted insights immediately actionable in SAP S/4HANA and the SAP’s intelligent suite.

Learn more about this and more in my product strategy live business talk at SAPPHIRE NOW.

Mike Flannagan is senior vice president of SAP Analytics and SAP Leonardo.