SAP Analytics Cloud
SAP was founded in 1972 as a business applications company. Today, the vendor has a turnover of €27.34 billion, employs more than 100,000 people and is one of the largest business software vendors in the world.
SAP’s analytics portfolio encompasses cloud and on-premises solutions for BI, analytics and enterprise planning. From a strategy perspective, SAP is investing heavily in innovation in the cloud while still supporting and developing its on-premises solutions. SAP’s analytics and EPM solutions are spread across different product lines. SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) and the on-premises solution SAP Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC) are its core offerings for planning and budgeting. Both are supplemented by SAP S/4HANA Finance for Group Reporting for financial consolidation and close. Together with SAP BusinessObjects BI (on-premises), SAP Analytics Cloud also plays a central role in the company’s BI and analytics portfolio. Advanced analytics functionality is also available in SAP Analytics Cloud.
SAP Analytics Cloud, SAP’s strategic cloud offering and analytics platform, brings together capabilities such as BI and data visualization, planning and augmented analytics for different user roles into one integrated platform. 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 being enhanced with more than 80 prebuilt business content packages (e.g., solutions for finance, sales and marketing, HR and various industries). The product is fully web-based with an HTML5 web client and a Microsoft Office 365 Excel add-in. SAP Analytics Cloud has a modern and user-friendly UI and offers functionality for all individual planning activities including strategic, operational, functional and financial planning. It integrates with all major SAP enterprise applications (e.g., SAP S/4HANA, SAP HANA and SAP Data Warehouse Cloud). In addition to using it with its own data models, SAP Analytics Cloud 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 BPC is SAP’s recommended product for those requiring an integrated on-premises planning and financial consolidation solution. As an additional front-end option, SAP BPC customers can combine SAP Analytics Cloud with the product’s planning engine. SAP Analytics Cloud can access SAP BPC’s planning model (data and structures) using a ‘BPC Live Connection’ without replicating data, thus providing write-back options for planning data directly into SAP BPC’s planning model in BW through write-back enabled queries.
User & Use Cases
Customers mainly use SAP Analytics Cloud for dashboards/BI applications (80 percent), standard/enterprise reporting (67 percent), ad hoc query (59 percent) and analysis (53 percent). 65 percent of respondents plan to use it for advanced analytics and 57 percent for budgeting/planning in the future.
SAP Analytics Cloud targets large corporations and mid-sized companies across all industries, mainly those that have an existing SAP system landscape. 71 percent of our sample of SAP Analytics Cloud customers come from large corporations (more than 2,500 employees) with a median of 250 users, but the impressive mean of 3,346 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 reports/navigating dashboards (by 92 percent), creating reports/dashboards (82 percent) and analyzing/exploring data (80 percent), which demonstrates the feature-richness of the product.
Customers achieve an average of 12 percent usage penetration among all employees, which is below the survey average of 21 percent. This indicates that the product is focused more on trained business power users than the majority of employees.
Current vs. planned use
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5 products most often evaluated in competition with SAP Analytics Cloud
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Percentage of employees using SAP Analytics Cloud
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Number of users using SAP Analytics Cloud
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Tasks carried out with SAP Analytics Cloud by business users
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Company size (number of employees)
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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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