SAP Analytics Cloud, SAP’s strategic cloud offering and analytics platform, brings together analytics capabilities such as business intelligence and data visualization, planning and augmented analytics for different user roles into one integrated product and user experience. In addition to using it with its own data models, the product can also be used as a front end for other SAP data sources in hybrid cloud scenarios (e.g., with SAP HANA, SAP BW/4HANA, etc.) without moving, caching or persisting the data into the cloud.
SAP was founded in 1972 as a business applications company. Today, the vendor employs 101,150 people worldwide and has a turnover of €27.6 bn. SAP is one of the largest business software vendors in the world. Its portfolio of analytics solutions encompasses cloud-based and on-premises solutions for business intelligence, augmented analytics and planning.
The vendor’s portfolio of analytics solutions encompasses cloud-based and on-premises solutions for business intelligence, augmented analytics and corporate performance management (e.g., planning, consolidation).
SAP Analytics Cloud, SAP’s strategic cloud offering and analytics platform, brings together analytics capabilities such as business intelligence and data visualization, planning and augmented analytics for different user roles into one integrated product and user experience. With a large and growing development team, SAP Analytics Cloud is becoming richer in features such as application design, planning and predictive functionality as well as predefined line of business and industry business content (e.g., solutions for finance, sales and marketing, human resources).
SAP is investing heavily in developing SAP Analytics Cloud, which is the central component of its business intelligence, augmented analytics and planning portfolio. SAP also continues to provide on-premises solutions such as SAP BusinessObjects BI and SAP BPC. In the cloud analytics segment, additional solutions are available such as SAP Digital Boardroom and SAP Analytics Hub (both part of SAP Analytics Cloud, which is built on the SAP Cloud Platform).
SAP’s original strategy was to view analytics as an extension of its all-inclusive ERP offerings. Therefore, the company launched SAP Business Warehouse (BW) in 1998, a completely packaged plug-and-play analytics solution designed to complement SAP ERP applications. The package contained connectors to SAP ERP modules, a data warehouse for storing source data, subject-oriented data marts and predefined content as well as tools for reporting, analysis (SAP BEx) and planning (SAP BW Integrated Planning, also known as SAP BW-IP). The goal was to provide a plug-and-play BI solution that would make it fast and easy for SAP customers to benefit from BI.
SAP Analytics Cloud is designed specifically for the cloud (SaaS). It is delivered on the SAP Cloud Platform (SCP), Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure and can be deployed in a public or a private cloud option. In a private cloud infrastructure, the hardware has to be HANA-certified, as the solution runs on HANA as a database.
Reports and dashboards (known as stories in SAP Analytics Cloud), as well as planning forms, are created with Designer, which is part of the solution. A “story” is a presentation-style document that uses charts, visualizations, text, images and pictograms to describe data. Designer offers functionality to select data views of a model and drag them to a Designer Action Pane to create a new report (same for dashboards). Once created, reports can be saved in a private or public folder, either for personal use or for group use. Furthermore, the “catalog” is a single access point for content published to users and teams within SAP Analytics Cloud. Each item is displayed as a card, which can be used to access the underlying content (e.g., stories, analytic applications, SAP Digital Boardroom presentations, external content). Since SAP Analytics Cloud is one integrated product, it is possible to pin charts and reports to public dashboards to make them available. Each report can also be saved as a template, for example, to comply with corporate design standards.
User & Use Cases
Customers mainly use SAP Analytics Cloud for dashboards/scorecards (77 percent), ad hoc query (55 percent), standard/enterprise reporting (52 percent) and basic data analysis (41 percent). 80 percent of respondents plan to use it for advanced analysis and 70 percent for budgeting/planning in the future. SAP Analytics Cloud targets large and mid-sized companies across all industries, mainly those that have an existing SAP system landscape. 86 percent of our sample of SAP Analytics Cloud customers come from large companies (more than 2,500 employees) with a median of 165 users, but the impressive mean of 1,365 users indicates there are also several significantly larger implementations.
SAP Analytics Cloud is geared to business power users with functionality for various BI, analytics and planning tasks. Typical tasks carried out with SAP Analytics Cloud by business users include viewing/navigating data (94 percent), exploring/analyzing data (86 percent) and creating reports (73 percent), which demonstrates the feature-richness of the product. Customers achieve an average of 7 percent usage penetration among all employees (compared to the survey average of 17 percent). This indicates that the product is focused more on trained business power users than the majority of employees.
Current vs. planned use
N=37
5 products most often evaluated in competition with SAP Analytics Cloud
N=42
Percentage of employees using SAP Analytics Cloud
N=44
Number of users using SAP Analytics Cloud
N=44
Tasks carried out with SAP Analytics Cloud by business users
N=44
Company size (number of employees)
N=44
Summary of SAP Analytics Cloud highlights
With 19 top ranks and 21 leading positions in four different peer groups, SAP Analytics Cloud once again achieves an outstanding set of results in this year’s BI & Analytics Survey. Convincing ratings in the majority of its KPIs help to consolidate its position as a global market-leading BI and analytics vendor that is delivering considerable benefits to its customers. Companies can benefit from using SAP Analytics Cloud in terms of faster reporting, analysis or planning, reduced costs and better business decisions. Many customers highlight the innovative capabilities of SAP Analytics Cloud to implement various modern BI and analytics use cases.
Cloud BI – Top-ranked
Peer Group: Large international BI vendors
Customer satisfaction – Top-ranked
Peer Group: Large international BI vendors
Implementer support – Top-ranked
Peer Group: Large international BI vendors
Innovation – Top-ranked
Peer Group: Large international BI vendors
Project success – Top-ranked
Peer Group: Large international BI vendors
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BARC’s Vendor Performance Summary contains an overview of The BI Survey results based on feedback from SAP Analytics Cloud users, accompanied by expert analyst commentary.
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