Review Sap Partner test Walldorf: the future is SAC…..

The  BI & Analytics team of McCoy & Partners are experts in SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC). One of the advantages of this latest SAAS solution from SAP is that customers no longer need to worry about software upgrade or patches: every two weeks, the system is automatically updated by SAP. Every two weeks new features are added to the system and bugs are being solved without customer interference.

Over the last years, McCoy has gained a lot of expertise in SAC and build a strong relationship with SAP.  Therefore, McCoy is also involved in the SAP Analytics Partner tests. During these events, the latest features, product roadmaps and demos are being shared by SAP with their partners. In return, the partners, test these new features and share their feedback from projects and customers. Also, product wish list and development priorities are discussed with SAP product management. 

The SAC partner test takes place several times per year on different locations around the globe. 

Last week, two McCoy consultants participated in a 3 days SAC partners test at the SAP Headquarters in Walldorf. Since there is an NDA applicable for these partner test we cannot share any details, but what we can say is that there will be a lot of new features revealed during next week’s SAPPHIRE event in Orlando. Especially in the planning and predictive area, there will be lots of new features announced. This will make SAC a possible alternative for BPC. Also, the first (light) version of scripting on top of SAC will be introduced. This will allow customers to build their own applications using SAC stories as input.

A lot of customers have invested heavily in SAP BW, therefore, it was good to see that SAP is going to catch up the backlog which currently exists for customers using the BW live connection in SAC e.g. by the end of the year it should be possible to blend e.g. two BW queries. Currently, this is only possible for HANA live views.

SAP is putting a lot of effort in developing API’s to integrate with other applications e.g. it will become much easier to integrate SAC reporting in other applications like e.g.  Fieldglass, Ariba and salesfore.com. Later this year a software development Kit (SDK) will be released for SAC enabling customers and partners to develop their own special components.

As already announced by Mike Flannagan (Senior VP SAP analytics) in his February blog about SAP BI’s Analytics Strategy (read here), SAP is driving a BI product converse strategy. To simplify the portfolio, going forward, SAP Analytics Cloud will be SAP’s primary analytics solution in all areas, so data discovery, planning and predictive.  By embedding more and more features in SAC this strategy becomes more and more a reality.

Although there still might be better products on the market in each individual area like e.g. Tableau in the Analytics, Atlassian in the planning and SAS in the predictive area, SAC is currently already the best choice to combine all these features in one single product. It gives you the ability to discover, analyse, plan, predict, and collaborate in one seamless user experience that integrates with both on-premise and cloud-based data sources and applications. Having all capabilities available in one tool and one platform will lead to an increase in usage and user adoption. Also, think about the simplification of your existing BI landscape you can achieve if you can do all of this with one single application!

As said, because of the NDA, we can not go into more details but with the new features released at next week SAPPHIRE and a fully packed list of developments on the roadmap for the rest of the year, SAC is becoming a mature product outperforming all their competitor products at least from a capability point of view.

In case you want to know more about SAP Analytics Cloud please do not hesitate to contact McCoy & Partners.