Value lies at the heart of the entire innovation and consumption experience around SAP Analytics Cloud – the value our customers gain from the application and the value we provide with new features and functionality.
As I explained at SAPPHIRE NOW, our converged analytics solution is growing at such a phenomenal rate because we continuously improve it based on customer feedback and the usage patterns we observe to help ensure we always deliver on our value promise.
Last year, in addition to our bi-weekly release schedule, we also decided to offer a quarterly release cycle, which allows customers to remain on a consistent version of SAP Analytics Cloud for longer, providing extra time to develop use-cases, train users, and deploy content within this specific version of the solution.
With Q2 2019 release of SAP Analytics Cloud now available, I’d like to offer a brief overview of a couple of the top features that have been delivered with this latest version.
Build, Embed, and Extend with SAP Analytics Cloud, Analytics Designer
One of the main analytics announcements we made at SAPPHIRE NOW concerned SAP Analytics Cloud, analytics designer. The idea behind these software development kit (SDK) capabilities was to give application designers a rich set of tools to tailor their analytics and address their organization’s specific requirements using one central analytics platform – SAP Analytics Cloud.
Now available to everyone with the Q2 2019 release, analytics designer enables customers, developers, and partners to build, embed, and extend intelligent analytic applications.
Designers can start from existing content, templates, and user stories, and customize these to develop innovative applications that bring together the combination of business intelligence, planning, and predictive capabilities. By reusing the same user interface (UI) elements and centrally maintained composites, they can also provide a consistent user experience with standardized analytics content.
Advanced scripting capabilities – auto complete, syntax checks, and content assistance to find available functions and data – as well as a rich library of widgets, including data-driven widgets such as tables and charts and R widgets with scripting access, all help speed up the development process. Furthermore, analytics designer applications can be embedded into other business applications and can host and communicate with other web pages.
For the CIO and IT teams, this means new applications can be developed at low cost thanks to reusable components and reduced complexity. For the user, the advantage lies in the tailored experience. And last but definitely not least, all of this comes at no additional cost for SAP Analytics Cloud customers. For more information on the features and functionality offered by SAP Analytics Cloud, analytics designer, take a look at “Introducing analytics designer in SAP Analytics Cloud: What is it, why use it, and when can I get started?”
New in Planning
From the start, SAP Analytics Cloud has always been about bringing the power of analytics and the insights it provides to every user, not just the specialists. The team is very proud of the steps we have taken in this direction, and Q2 2019 release marks another important milestone on this journey with the release of visual formulas. This capability allows even those users with limited expertise in programming to write advanced formula rules and create planning scenarios and models by simply dragging and dropping the required elements.
Capabilities for SAP Business Warehouse, SAP BW/4HANA, SAP S/4HANA
SAP Analytics Cloud connects to the BW query interface available in SAP Business Warehouse, SAP BW/4HANA, and SAP S/4HANA to consume live data. With the Q2 2019 release, we have an exciting list of data visualization capabilities that are now supported on live SAP Business Warehouse and SAP S/4HANA models with the BW query interface. These include waterfall charts, where the first and last measures represent a total, as well as geo layer support and variance chart support.
Additional new functionality comes with the support for tuple filters in SAP Business Warehouse queries. Tuple filters allow for more complex, asymmetric selections and enable linked analysis with two or more dimensions.
SAP Analytics Cloud also offers powerful options to enrich BW query data, such as blending live BW query data with local and/or acquired data. With the latest release, we are now also introducing browser-based data blending for SAP Business Warehouse live data models with imported data models, giving customers the option to use and evaluate the blending functionality without configuring SAP HANA smart data integration.
We are very excited about all of the new features and functions we are delivering with the Q2 2019 release. You can read about all of these highlights and more in the latest release notes on the SAP Analytics Cloud site, and kick-start your digital transformation with SAP Analytics Cloud with a free 30 day trial.
Gerrit Kazmaier is senior vice president of Analytics and Database and Data Management at SAP.
