Posts tagged SAP BusinessObjects

What is SAP Lumira Cloud?

As you might have noticed, SAP recently changed the name of their one year old product SAP Visual Intelligence into SAP Lumira. We have seen this before with the product SAP Dashboards.

I can imagine SAP Dashboards still wakes up at night, bathed in sweat, having nightmares about it’s ever changing name. It went from Xcelsius to SAP Crystal Presentation Design to SAP Dashboards in a very short time frame. Customers are already struggling with the broad BI portfolio product names so changing names isn’t always the best thing to do. In the end, I do agree that SAP Dashboards probably is the best name since it describes the best what the product actually does, making professionally authored and interactive dashboards and BI apps. Back to SAP Visual Intelligence / Lumira.

In this blog post from Timo Elliot, SAP explains why they changed the name of SAP Visual Intelligence into SAP Lumira. I could make jokes again but that would be too easy. In the end, if SAP thinks Lumira is a better name, that’s ok. Just make sure you stick to this new name for the coming years.

The funny thing about the name change is that it actually only is a name change from SAP Visual Intelligence into SAP Lumira. There aren’t any new features or functions released with this name change. Together with the name change, SAP introduced a new product in the ‘Lumira family’, which is SAP Lumira Cloud.  

SAP Lumira Cloud gives you the opportunity to upload multiple data sources into the cloud and start analyzing the data in minutes. You don’t need to install software, buy hardware or worry about software upgrades. Just pull your credit card and start analyzing. A very nice and detailed FAQ can be read over here.  

SAP aims at small and medium sized organizations or departments within large organizations. The best thing is that there is a free version which enables you to upload a max of 1GB sized data sources into the cloud.

What is the promised business value of SAP Lumira Cloud?

• Deliver faster time to insight in the cloud

• Visualize data quickly with an intuitive drag-and-drop interface

• Reduce time to access and upload multiple data sources

• Maximize business knowledge with a combination of big picture insights and granular details

• Increase self-service data usage with access on any device

• Be up and running quickly without software or hardware

Competitors in the data exploration area like Tableau offer a similar ‘limited’ free to use service to get people enthusiastic about the product. I think it is a good thing that software vendors offer easy and free access to (parts of) their software. This way you can try before you buy.

Getting it started

Of course I signed up for a free SAP Lumira Cloud account and gave it a spin. It took me just 24 minutes to get some first impressions  on this product. I kicked my test drive off with a tweet.

I created a very simple dataset in MS Excel as you can see below. I wanted to help Lumira and myself a bit by giving self explanatory column names. As you can see, the revenue ranges from 5 up to 40. This could make a nice graph. As an extra feature, we could add another measure to show the margin. This is the third column.

I navigated to the SAP Lumira Cloud landing page and logged on. As you can see below, there is a (too small) footer text mentioning that it still is in Beta. I would strongly advise to make this as clear as possible, for example by stating it behind the product name in the upper left corner of the screen.

After l logged on I uploaded the dataset and started creating a simple visualization. It took me just a couple of minutes to get the result which is shown below. The remainder of the 24 minutes were spent on trying to fix frustrating behavior of the chart.

It’s obvious that this result is completely useless. All bars have the same height, there is no Y-axis scale and the months are sorted alphabetically. Well I don’t think datasets come easier than the one I created so I should be able to create a very simple bar chart displaying revenue and/or margin per month. Adding two key figures (both revenue and margin) didn’t work out. Perhaps I’m too stupid or it’s just not possible two compare two measures.

Since I cannot manually set the Y-axis scale I tried to fix this by swapping to a line chart. I don’t know why but instead of just a single line, I get about twelve mini line charts including markers, organized in columns. Not what I expected.

Another thing that could be optimized is the horizontal scroll bar on the X-axis of the chart. Why do I have to scroll when there are just twelve values? Since this is all web technology (probably HTML5) and designed also for mobile use, why doesn’t the graph just scale automatically to the available space. That shouldn’t be to difficult?

Normally the X-axis values are being displayed below the graph. For some reason, the enlightening Lumira positions these labels above the graph instead of below the graph where they should be.

I didn’t manage to find out how to activate the properties like like color, transparency, size and animation.

Update: You’ll need to drag one of the measures on the properties.

After little struggle, I managed to use the Trellis functionality. I haven’t seen this term before, perhaps because I’m not a native English speaker? You can add measures in the rows or columns area of Trellis. The result is displayed below. For example, you can see in which months a revenue of 10 exists. In the example below, in dec, feb, jul and perhaps more but I can’t see because of the horizontal scroll bar.

Who failed the test?

After these small exercises I thought it was time to log off. You can probably guess already that I wasn’t very excited about the current state of this product. Perhaps not so smart to make such a marketing buzz about it including a 90% discount offer during Sapphire. I’d rather pay 100% for a great product instead of 10% for a beta product stressing me out.

Of course it’s possible that I didn’t click the right buttons or that I should have watched some tutorials or something. In the end, I’d expect that with quite some BI experience, I should be able to work my way around in this product quite easily.

The question is who failed the test. Did I fail or did SAP Lumira Cloud. To give myself a second chance I started MS Excel again, selected the data range and made just two clicks for selecting a clustered column chart. The result is shown below. Two clicks in MS Excel gave more enlightening insights than spending about 20 minutes in SAP’s latest BI cloud innovation. Quite painful.

Conclusion after first 24 minutes:

Regular readers of my blog know that I’m straightforward and not afraid to share my vision and opinion. That should be one of the value points of blogging. Sharing experiences, good or bad. I’m disappointed that this first speed-date with Lumira Cloud turned out to be a bad one. Perhaps things will improve or get more user friendly towards the future.

I hope that I’ll be able to share some good experiences in the near future on for example version 1.1 of SAP Design Studio, which seems to shape up quite nice.

If you’ve had a experience with SAP Lumira Cloud yourself, good or bad, please share it through the comments.

Update 5/14/2013:

Martijn van Foeken, also a BI professional, tried to help me:

“I guess you need to change it just a little to get a meaningfull chart. Put the Revenue in the Y-Axis as well. Then the chart will display properly. If you want to define different colors you should place Month in the Color properties.”

Ok, let’s try that. The result is as follows:

This is still not what I want. Who’s next?

On Twitter, Martijn suggests to reboot the application and start all over again. Ok, here we go.

<In this space, I wanted to copy paste the screenshot of the result. However, I couldn’t get the same result twice. I also saw the vertical bar chart was transformed into a horizontal bar chart. This is becoming quite an adventure.>

10 minutes later…

Ok, now it works. The pitfall is that in a dataset, every column is available as both a measure and a dimension. You’ll have to drag the measures from the first columns into the visualization pane instead of the colomn headers of the other columns (2, 3 and 4 in my example). I doubt if a business user will find this out by himself. Perhaps the interface could be optimized for this.

After this fix, it was quite easy for me to drag the ‘margin’ measure onto color property. Because of the scroll bar I can’t see the whole month range. However, it starts to look more what I hoped to see.

Updated conclusion after spending more time:

The user interface isn’t really that self explanatory. Users will probably need a bit of instruction or training before starting to use this application. You’ll need to know what interactions (drag and drop) should be applied to activate the properties. Also you should know that you’d probably only drag measures from the first column on the visualization pane instead of the other columns. Once you know how stuff works and are willing to invest some extra time, you can actually do quite some interesting analyses. Especially the fact that it’s free up to 1GB personal use makes it interesting.

Perhaps I’ll do another analysis with a more complex dataset once I know my way around in this enlightening place called SAP Lumira Cloud. To be continued..