SAP has joined the diverse market of analytics platforms with the SAP analytics portfolio, designed to enable organizations’ better data management and use. Advanced analytics platforms like SAP’s are being utilized to find impactful trends and insights from existing data sets that enable better business agility and ideally answer questions previously considered beyond your reach.

Most executives acknowledge that maintaining a competitive advantage requires providing people with the capability to make better, more informed decisions. The SAP analytics portfolio was created to allow organizations to take control of their varied data sources to drive value. But since its creation, how exactly is SAP enhancing the analytics portfolio? How will these enhancements impact its users? Is this a rebranding of legacy analytical tools, or something brand new? It’s a little of both.

SAP’s strategy over the past couple of years has been to converge analytical solutions to minimize the inherent redundancy of overlapping tools. The current SAP platform, called SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC), is designed to provide analytical capabilities to all users through one product. This includes not only reporting, dashboards, and enhanced visualization but data transformational capabilities as well. Having analytical capabilities in the cloud allows self-service among users and provides a central hub for data to flow into and out of from a single source of truth in a central location.

Will this be transformative and adopted? Hard to say. Only time will tell. I believe however, that if SAP simplifies the method of pulling data into the hub, provides tools that will allow for easy data transformation, and pre-delivers standard dashboards for ease of visualization, then this should be an easy solution to adopt.

Since all analytics are accessed through the hub, you should be able to not only track usage but understand which systems, data sources, and analytics are widely adopted. A central location that has transformation rules, definitions, and tools has significant advantages. From a centralized technology standpoint, a single platform has always been preferred.

To be successful, SAP’s analytics need to not only continue to innovate and improve their product portfolio, but above all else, it needs to be simple to adopt and use. Even though SAC is being widely touted as a game-changing analytics product, challenges will inevitably arise around the conversion and migration path for its existing enterprise customers. In our next blog, I’ll dive into what that migration path looks like and highlight obstacles to note when transitioning to a cloud platform. I hope you’ll join us in this journey to unravel the analytics cloud solution. Learn more about Clarkston’s data and analytics solutions here.

Co-author and Contributions by: Anand Nataraj