SAPinsider SAP BI Convergence Q&A Transcript

The APOS-sponsored SAPinsider Q&A - SAP BI Product Convergence Update transcript is now available for you to view at:

APOS On-Demand Webinars

This SAPinsider Q&A featured many SAP BI luminaries, including Jayne Landry, Merlijn Ekkel, Blair Wheadon and Ty Miller offering insights on the future path of the SAP BI ecosphere.

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.

What's Happening with SAP's BI Products, and What Does It Mean for You? WIS SAPinsider Q & A

When: May 4, 2015 - 11:30 am ET
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APOS is pleased to present this online live Q & A session in conjunction with SAP and SAPinsider. During this session, SAP product experts will explore how SAP BI 4.2 can enrich the experiences of both users and information consumers.

During planning for this session, the session title went through a few iterations, including:

• Will SAP's BI Tool Convergence and Interoperability Strategy Make Your BI Team Better?
• Platform Progress, Tool Convergence, and Quadrant Qualms….Where are we now??

These titles, and the title we finally settled on, all describe the session accurately, but the last, which was deemed a bit controversial, describes a particular quandary that developed when Gartner published its most recent BI Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms.

Back in February - on Super Bowl Sunday, to be precise -- Mark Richardson published a critique of Gartner's change in direction. His post was called 'Moving the Goalposts': Why #DataViz Often Fails to Reflect Reality. In his post, Mark noted:

GARTNER has moved their focus for this document away from “the long-standing BI requirement for centrally provisioned, highly governed and scalable system-of-record reporting” – and toward “analytical agility and business user autonomy”. That’s their call – but I think it is the wrong one.

There is a danger in reliance on ad hoc reporting and data visualizations to the exclusion of the underlying data, which is why a “system-of-record” reporting engine is so important.

It’s easy to be deceptive with visualizations, even to deceive yourself, but the real problem in such cases is generally inaccurate data, especially when taken cumulatively, in which case simple, seemingly inconsequential variances can distort the picture and lead to poor decision-making.

What is required above all, as Mark Richardson points out, is stability, accuracy, and governance. Can these qualities be said to be characteristics of a platform?

It has been nearly 2 years since Jayne Landry published Run Simple: Convergence of the SAP BI Product Portfolio. Now, with the release of SAP BI 4.2, it's time to review the progress SAP has made on the platform, and check the convergence and interoperability of the BI tool portfolio.

From the conceptual to the technical, this session will let you explore the boundaries and synergies of the SAP BI 4.2 BI tool set, and discover the potential for Lumira, Design Studio, Web Intelligence, Analysis for Office and HANA within your deployment of the SAP BI platform.

Panelists will include:

• Jayne Landry - Global VP & GM, Business Intelligence, SAP
• Ty Miller - Senior Director of Solution Management for Enterprise Business Intelligence, SAP
• Olivier Duvelleroy - Senior Director, Solution Management, Business Intelligence, SAP
• Alexander Peter - Product Manager, SAP
• David Stocker - Senior Product Manager, SAP
• Gregory Botticchio - Product Manager, Web Intelligence, SAP
• Adrian Westmoreland - Product Manager, SAP

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