SAPinsider Q&A Highlights - SAP BI Convergence Update

APOS was proud once again, for the third consecutive year, to provide an opportunity to interact with some of SAP’s leading BI lights on the subject of SAP BI convergence. We don’t yet have an official transcript of yesterday’s SAPinsider Q&A - SAP BI Product Convergence Update: What’s Happening Today, What Is Coming Next, and What Does It Mean for You?, but here are some highlights.

By the way, when the transcript for the Q&A becomes available, we will post a link on our APOS On-Demand Webinars page, where you can also view a large number of past webinars on topics you may be interested in, such as:

• Automated Report Testing
• UNX Universe Adoption Testing
• Semantic Layer Update with SAP’s Pierpaolo Vezzosi
• SAP BusinessObjects Advanced Monitoring

...and much more.

This Q&A session was billed as a chance to:

…interact directly with Jayne Landry, Merlijn Ekkel, Blair Wheadon, Ty Miller, and several other key product leaders from BI product groups at SAP, including SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence, SAP BusinessObjects Lumira, SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio, and SAP BusinessObjects Analysis for Office. Here's your chance to take a look at the road ahead for SAP’s BI products, assess your opportunities, and seek clarifications to questions

It lived up to this billing quite nicely.

APOS COO Allan Pym started the session off asking Jayne Landry (Global Vice President & General Manager, Business Intelligence, SAP) about the progress of the SAP BI convergence initiative. Jayne responded:

We have made tremendous progress on the convergence front. When we started this journey 3 years ago we had 14 different client tools running on the BI platform! We’ve now got that down to 5, with Crystal, Webi, Analysis Office, Design Studio and Lumira... And we’ve adhered to the convergence principles we laid out from the start – all existing content is safe and all existing BI 4.x clients continue to be supported so that customers can move to the “go to” tools at their own pace.

Jayne continued with a description of upcoming convergence advancements:

The next big advancement is the convergence of Lumira and Design Studio into a single code line with the release of Lumira 2.0, currently in beta and planned for GA late Q2/early Q3. This will enable end-to-end workflows from rapid prototyping by business users through to deployment of production dashboards at scale by developers.

You’ll have to wait for the official transcript for more, but I can tell you that it will contain substantial content on a number of subjects of interest, including:

• The Design Studio / Lumira convergence
• SAP BusinessObjects Cloud
• New Analytics announcements to be made at SAPPHIRE
• Web Intelligence improvements
• New features in SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.2 SP 4

Bookmark the APOS On-Demand Webinars page and check back over the coming days for a link to the official transcript.