Big Data Intelligence - the way is the goal

SAP's whole chaos theory is made clear by the product Lumira: once introduced as a public domain for free use, then in a professional version, Lumira became subject to licensing until SAP discontinued the product against the objections of the user association DSAG and the protest of many existing customers.

At the end of last year, Lumira 2.0 supported SAP's hybrid BI strategy and offered new interoperability scenarios for collaboration between business and IT.

Lumira was SAP's data analysis and visualization software, enabling IT departments and developers to create highly scalable business intelligence applications.

The now discontinued version convinced with the combination of Lumira and BusinessObjects Design Studio in one solution as well as with improved usability and optimized support of the SAP Business Warehouse solutions.

Lumira enabled users to analyze both cloud and on-premise data. And users were delighted last fall:

"The redesigned user interface is great"

Jason Shearer, Lead Data Scientist at L3 Technologies, emphasized.

"I'm excited about the ability to combine data from different sources. So my business users are able to create prototypes on the fly."

Analytics Cloud & Hub

Chief Technology Officer Bernd Leukert had no mercy on the SAP community, despite the broad-based Leonardo strategy and the positive response to Lumira 2.0. Lumira must die!

At the turn of the year, BI priorities had to be reset and the Leonardo strategy sharpened. SAP's new BI strategy can be operated in the cloud and in hybrid system environments. It is part of the SAP Leonardo digital innovation system, which is designed to give customers better insight into their operational activities.

SAP Analytics Cloud and Hub provides existing customers with some of the most important analytics capabilities. It is designed to enable them to analyze and visualize data, as well as plan and forecast - all in an integrated, cloud-based analytics solution running on the SAP Cloud Platform.

New features include: fast data access to the Business Warehouse and S/4 applications that support hybrid data scenarios and allow data to remain in on-premises systems; advanced intelligent data analysis and preparation that includes machine learning (ML) capabilities and simulates data to unearth hidden information and support business users with recommendations; and planning enhancements for bulk data collection, currency conversion and resolutions in Business Planning and Consolidation.

"With SAP Analytics Hub, we can more quickly deploy and grow business intelligence and analytics solutions across the enterprise"

Rob Roemers, Manager of Business Intelligence Solutions at STIB-MIVB, said.

"We're again reaping the benefits of our years of investment in business intelligence - by easily accessing information that many users previously didn't know was available."

PAL & ML

The possibilities of the new SAP strategy "Analytics Cloud and Hub" are desired and sensible. But SAP's actions do not show a strategy.

Many functions were already possible with Hana PAL (Predictive Analysis Library) or the Lumira program mentioned above. Machine and Deep Learning is implemented with the help of the system supplier Nvidia, because Hana was never intended for this.

What Hana does very well, however, is to provide a graph database in parallel to a table-oriented SQL database, which is based on graph theory and thus has significant advantages over SQL in certain use cases.

The pilot issue of leonardo.report will take on the topics of PAL, Graph Engine, Machine/Deep Learning and, of course, Predictive Analytics including Big Data, starting in October of this year and quarterly as a magazine from 2019, as well as on an ongoing basis at www.leonardo.report.

SAP offers capabilities for different industries and business areas with Leonardo Machine Learning integration and predictive capabilities for real-time insights into each business context, but no strategy yet emerges in the Leonardo universe.

It is a hodgepodge of possibilities with no direction or goal. Of course, the following statement is true:

"With the new S/4 release, we are ensuring that our customers have the innovations they need to successfully implement their digital business strategy"

explained Uwe Grigoleit, S/4 Hana Go-to-Market General Manager and Senior Vice President at SAP.

"It offers enhancements that make it easier than ever for companies to benefit from insights into real-time operations. This is possible because the new intelligent applications leverage SAP Leonardo Machine Learning and Predictive Analytics and are directly integrated into the digital core."

But even Hana Predictive Analysis Library (PAL) was directly integrated into the database core two years ago. There are well over 300 PAL command calls for complex and higher statistics, with which the vast majority of predictive analytics functions can be realized. You don't always have to reinvent the wheel and create new names for it.