SAP Analytics Cloud Reviews

We have our data stored in SAP BW. SAP Analytics Cloud is now the main Reporting Tool from SAP. We are gradually shifting the reporting from BO Webi / BO Lumira / BEx Wad to SAC.

It improves the buy-in from business for SAP technology.

Its user-friendliness is very valuable for end-users. It allows them to create dashboards without very experienced IT knowledge (compared to BO Lumira).

Though it's the best placed product when working with an SAP BW backend, it still lacks a lot of functionalities when compared to other tools such as Power BI or Tableau. 

The technical support of SAP is not perfect and could be much better. 

It takes a lot of time to have lacking functionalities implemented.

The integration with the BW backend can still be improved. Though both solutions are from the same vendor and the tool is positioned as "the" reporting tool on top of a BW environment, the integration between both still lacks a smooth integration. For example, authorization management is still not synchronized out of the box.

We were amidst the first adaptors of SAC and have seen it growing to a more mature level.

It is quite stable. We had very limited downtime in the past years. The continuous upgrades (cloud) can deliver sometimes moments of surprise, certainly when the layout is impacted.

It is very scalable.

Their technical support is not perfect and could be better. SAP Analytics Cloud is still lacking a lot of functionalities as compared to its competitors, and when we address these questions to SAP, it takes a lot of time to have these functionalities implemented.

Yes, multiple tools: WAD, BO xCelcius, Lumira. 

It is the future vision of SAP (for now).

The initial setup of SAP Analytics Cloud is easy because it is a cloud product. You can start using the environment very soon after the decision to do so is taken.

In house with a little help during startup from SAP.

Its pricing is fair when compared to its competitors.

Tableau, Power BI. From a user perspective, much more flexible and functional, but lacking the proper integration with SAP BW.

If your data is stored in the SAP environment, it is still the best tool in the market. Microsoft Power BI and Tableau are very nice in functionality and layout, but they lack functionality when you link them to an SAP database.

My suggestion would be to use the tools from the same vendor. The reporting tool should be from the same vendor whose backend system you are using. I advised the same in our company because we have a lot of tools. If you have an SAP data warehouse, then use tools from SAP on top of this data warehouse. If you have SQL Database, then Microsoft Power BI is more suitable.

I would rate SAP Analytics Cloud an eight out of ten.

We use this solution for financial planning and analysis. We definitely plan to expand our usage of this solution. 

This solution brings our team together easily through its collaboration abilities. 

The ability to collaborate and plan together is great. In fact, the collaboration capabilities across the board are very good. Also, integration-wise, it's very good. 

I would like to know how Analytics Cloud plays with other products like SAP Data Warehouse Cloud and SAP HANA Cloud. SAP Data Warehouse Cloud is now integrated with SAP Analytics Cloud, but I would like to know how they strategically work together; what is the strategy? How do they work together and how is SAP planning to implement self-service? Currently, it's not very clear — particularly regarding Data Warehouse Cloud which is now part of SAP Analytics Cloud. It's quite difficult to navigate because SAP has many products.

Figuring out how to navigate all of the products around Data Warehouse Cloud and SAP Analytics Cloud and BW for HANA is quite difficult. The strategy of all the individual products and the roadmap itself, if you take it separately, it all looks good. There is a transformation navigator, but I don't think it's useful. It's not very easy to use; it's more technical than it is on the business side. In short, the roadmap and integration with other SAP Analytics products like Data Warehouse Cloud need to be improved. It's not clear and I can't find any information from SAP addressing the subject.

I have been using SAP Analytics Cloud for one year. 

This solution is quite stable. 

We don't require that much support; it's all in the cloud and it's been pretty good. It's well supported I would say.

We used Power BI and Tableau, but they both do not offer the native integration and business content that SAP provides. SAP provides a lot of business content and templates which is quite handy when it comes to complex projects.

The initial setup was very straightforward. 

A team of consultants helped us with deployment — they were very helpful. As far as deployment is concerned, we followed an agile implementation model.

Deployment time varies depending on the project size and complexity. SAP has features like analytics, planning, predictive capabilities, simulation, and analytical application. All of these features are very good. They're all combined into one platform where everything can interact together.

Compute and storage features should be sold separately. 

Typically, compute and storage is sold separately because there are a lot of use cases. A lot of people ask for it because other competitive products offer it. If they could provide that, it would be very helpful.

If you're interested in using this solution, you have to be aware of the frequent changes and product improvement that occurs. Every month there's a new update. You need to be aware of that but at the same time, don't get carried away with all the new features. Keep track of the roadmap and what new updates are coming. It won't cause any problems, but as it updates so often, it's good to keep track of what new features will be available and which features you should implement.

SAP Analytics can be used as an all-in-one source. It can bring everything together: BI, predictive, planning, simulation — it can combine all of this into a single user interface. Other products have also done this, but SAP has done it very nicely. It's quite good, it's quite stable — I like it.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of eight. It combines all features into a single user interface, including planning, prediction, simulation, analytics application, and analytics or data dash boarding and reporting — I like it.

SAP ERP itself is not a product, it is a suite of products. There are multiple products within SAP ERP or the Business One suit. Analytics for Cloud is one of them. There are multiple other products that we could see if I had different modules. It depends on what module you are.

My primary use for SAP Analytics Cloud Planning is dashboard reporting, forecasting, budgeting, predictive analytics and so on.

SAP ERP products are mainly for business processes improvement.

The features that I have found most valuable with SAP ERP products are their good user interface, stability, functionality, and good interface options.

In terms of what could be improved, I would say their positioning. Effectively there are too many parts from SAP in the planning and consolidation space. If they want to position SAP Analytics Cloud for this space, they need to position it properly and make sure that the other products are also positioned alongside it in such a way that the customer doesn't get confused. That's one more supportive thing. Other than that, the scalability, stability and all that, need to be improved. They need a better scalability rate.

Additionally, SAP ERP could have more competitive pricing, more openness, more accessibility, more standard products, and more planned releases to the new features.

I have been using SAP Analytics Cloud for close to one year and SAP ERP for 15 years.

In terms of stability, SAP Analytics Cloud is still a relatively new product. From a stability point of view, I won't comment because it's recently in the market. I'm sure the new, upcoming releases will be in the right direction to make the product more stable.

In terms of SAP ERP products' scalability, I am a contractor, I don't work for a particular organization, so it depends on where you are implementing. It varies from 5,000 to 20,000 or even 100,000 people using the product.

In terms of numbers of users using SAP Analytics Cloud, it's not financial planning so it is relatively smaller, it may be around 500 users.

In terms of support, it has been really good. They have a good understanding of the product.

The SAP ERP products are not easy to install. But it has its own sequence of steps that we need to follow. But it's not that complicated either.

Generally, in terms of all SAP products, the licensing cost is at a slightly higher price. They need to make it more competitive.

I would recommend the SAP ERP and Analytics Cloud products for users who want to start using it. In general, on a scale of one to ten, I would give SAP ERP an eight.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate SAP Analytics Cloud a seven.

I would like to see more standardization here.

We are using this solution for the analysis of the daily sales with this particular project that we are working on. 

We also analyze what items are used daily, and how many items there are. We are using this solution to gather this information.

We are also using this for protection.

The most valuable features are the analytical application and the user story.

I have used all of the features that are available with this solution, including the dropdown list filter, radio button, and R Visualization.

Related to storage there is the Numeric point, geo-map, latitude, and longitude.

The interface is user-friendly.

With the R Visualization, the coding is somewhat complex.

SAP Analytics Cloud requires a lot of coding and I would like the coding to be somewhat minimal. When I use other tools, they don't require a lot of coding. There is coding for columns and that is fine, that is minimal. 

I have been working with SAP Analytics Cloud since I started with this company, two and a half years ago.

We are using a live connection.

It's a stable solution. We have created the connections and we help pull the data. We have not had any issues.

We have not tried to scale this solution. We had two users, but now I am the only person who is using this solution.

At this time we only have one project running with SAP Analytics Cloud. We are expecting that more will decide to use it, but we haven't had any contracts related to this solution.

We have not contacted technical support or submitted any tickets.

The initial setup was complex.

It took seven months in total. Three months to deploy and before going live, there were several months of testing to ensure that everything was completed.

I completed the setup and deployment and needed help from an integrator for the data.

I would recommend SAP Analytics Cloud to others. It is a good solution but I want to suggest that they minimize the coding by using the analytical application.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

I am a developer and I work mostly on the technical side.

The most valuable features are on the application side, where you can design applications into your analytics on the platform.

There are many scripting capabilities with a language that is close to JavaScript. It's not exactly JavaScript but it's a spin-off of it.

It has a rich number of templates included that you can enhance.

It's easier to get going on, compared to other solutions. 

Many of my clients are apprehensive when you have to deploy the solution. They ask you if the data could be transferred to visualization software.

It's cloud-based, and what's good about the cloud is that it doesn't need to store any data. It can read your data and generate it from the NetApp file. It can generate your model or how your model is going to look like. You don't need to transfer your data set to the cloud to report on.

It's quite flexible.

The pricing could be improved. It's quite expensive.

I don't know how usable it is for other platforms. 

In terms of connectivity, if you want to report on live data you have to use what is called the calculation view. It's a graphical view of SAP HANNA, but it's quite limiting as a structure.

They need support for more languages, Python for example. I know that Tableau does this quite well.

If you can integrate more features from the programming side, it would enhance analytics especially the languages that are more analytics-based such as R. I think SAP Analytics Cloud supports a measure of R but could be enhanced.

I may have a narrow view of its usage, but I think that it is quite dependent on SAP environments.

I have not encountered any clients who are using it for Oracle ERP or an Oracle database and are reporting are using SAP cloud.   

It's quite, vendor narrow. For an analytics platform, it's quiet, vendor restrictive.

I have been working with SAP Analytics Cloud for a year and a half.

It's quite stable.

It's a scalable product.

We work with medium-sized enterprise companies, but mostly large-sized clients use SAP. Pharmaceuticals can be used as an example.

It has good technical support.

Previously, I have tried Tableau but not project wise in terms of deployment. I have a lab where I can do some trials.

Also, I have worked with PowerBI a little bit but not in-depth.

It's quite expensive and costs a lot to maintain, especially with licensing.

If the client is SAP-based then I would say it's quite okay to implement this product. 

It's stable, provided they have the budget for the licensing which is, I think most of the time, the bottleneck. Also, they have to consider other supply systems, their internal users. What is the diversity, how many of them work on strictly SAP solutions, and what are the compatibility issues where you cannot be stuck with one product?

I think it's pretty much okay provided you can scale and then it depends on how technical the people are. So, we have two variants of it in SAP. 

There is the SAP Analytics Cloud Discovery, which is just mainly for discovery analytics. You basically create SAP reports, nothing advanced. Then you have the Designer, which enables you to do a little bit more scripting and other advanced features. Depending on the end-user population, you can train down towards the pure basic reporting or really develop an application on it.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We use it for publishing financial reports. 

The visualization feature is the most valuable. SAP Analytics Cloud is also very easy to use.

The security, authorization, and live connection to the back-office system features can be improved.

A business analyst colleague who creates complex financial management reports has mentioned that he wants to see more fact and visualization features. It would be helpful to have more visualization features to be able to prepare more stories or reports for executives. For example, Tableau has some visualization features that are not present in this solution. 

I have been using SAP Analytics Cloud for two years.

We experienced some upgrades and interruptions recently. I would say it has a 95% availability.

It is scalable. Agility and scalability are the benefits of the cloud solution. If I want to put 500 users tomorrow, I just simply add them. I don't have to worry about performance, service, memory, and all the other things.

We have between 50 to 100 users who are accessing SAP to see their reports. They need to see financial information. They might be viewing these reports on a weekly basis or a monthly basis.

We have created some tickets through our partner for some issues related to the maximum available fields, the number of lines to upload, or some restrictions related to the cloud. We get monthly upgrades on the cloud for functionality. In the next month's upgrade, thankfully, they will include the resolution of the problem. I would rate their technical support a seven out of ten.

We have used On-Premise BI, Webi business objects, SAP business objects, and Tableau. We moved to SAP because we recognize the value and advantage of SAP Cloud Analytics over other solutions.

The initial setup was simple. It took us a day to deploy it.

Initially, we started to use it ourselves for simple reports and simple uploads from Excel files. It took us less than a day to see a simple visualization of the report. In the next phase, it got more complicated in the sense that we implemented a single sign-on and live connection to the back-office systems. We had some SAP experts who helped us with what should be done.

It is not the most expensive one. You have to do the cost-of-ownership analysis and take a lot of things into consideration to come up with the conclusion that it is cheaper or not, but its price is reasonable. It provides value for money. 

SAP Analytics Cloud is an easy-to-use tool that can help you to analyze data. It also depends on the industry and what you want to use it for, but it is an easy tool. 

Before start using it for advanced reports, I would suggest spending a month learning this tool well. Because it is so easy to use, when you start using it for doing complex things in the beginning, you might realize that you haven't done it the right way because you didn't have the training. Don't get too enthusiastic about the ease of use of SAP. Do get the training and learn how to make proper reports, how to appropriately use the models, how to connect to on-premise systems, and how to implement live connections. After that, start building complex reports and use it for productive work.

I would rate SAP Analytics Cloud an eight out of ten.

We use this solution as part of an embedded analytics use case for an ERP application. SAP are starting to embed Analytics Cloud as a solution within their ERP application, which gives you the options for closed-loop analytics, as you go from insights to action within a single ERP application. It can also be used to bring together multiple data sources, different sources of data from various applications and use the application to blend and trade analytics solutions across different parts of the organization. The product suits small to large enterprise, it supports all user types. We are partners with SAP and I'm an analytics practice lead.  

A point of differentiation in the market for Analytics Cloud compared to other analytics products, is it offers not only business intelligence within the application, but also it has inbuilt AI and machine learning capabilities that can be used not only by data scientist types in the organization, but for general users who can get the benefit of inbuilt predictive features in the tool. The other really compelling part of it is that it's also a planning application. You can do full life cycle from plan through execution in a single platform. That's quite unique for SAP. A lot of the other software vendors do analytics products and they do planning products. This is quite a unique combination that has both BI predictive and planning in a single application. And that's really where its strengths is.

I think what could be improved is a lot of those intelligent features that I mentioned, the AI and predictive functions within the tool work really well with data that you import into the platform, but it doesn't work as well with SAP live connections. If they could make those predictive features available to any source, whether it's SAP or non SAP, it would be a really, really compelling product. 

I'd like to see formatted reporting as an additional feature, such as pixel perfect style formatted reporting. I'd also like to see the product on parity when you compare acquired data and live data models, to know that the features are identical. 

I've been using this solution for two years. 

I believe the stability needs more work. The product was first released about five years ago and it's still maturing, which means a lot of new functionality is released with each update. Sometimes that can be a little bit disruptive as features change. 

The scalability is pretty good, you've got options of either having it publicly hosted, or you can also have a private hosting option in a restricted area in the cloud data center. You can also add capacity to it quite easily. It's elasticity as an application for scale-out is pretty good. And underneath the covers, it runs SAP HANA, which is an in-memory database. So that makes a pretty performance. I'm happy with it. 

The technical support could be improved. 

I would say that Analytics Cloud is definitely improving although it's not yet fully comparable. There are some features in BusinessObjects that are not yet in Analytics Cloud, but I would say, from my perspective, that the overall the benefits and advantages of using SAC outweigh BusinessObjects. 

Initial setup is somewhere in the middle of straightforward and complex, it just depends on the source of information. It's not overly simple and it's not overly complex. We have the solution up and running with customers in three weeks for a trial, and that's sending up the application, connecting it to their source systems and demonstrating one really good example of a dashboard or report. We carry out the deployment internally. There's very little maintenance required because it's software as a service, a SaaS offering, a lot of that housekeeping and maintenance and upgrade of the solution is managed by SAP, by the software vendors. Again, that's one of its strong selling points, it requires very little administration overhead.

I believe that SAC is cheaper than BusinessObjects for a basic user license. It's difficult to compare because one is an on-premise pricing model and the other is subscription based. You're not really comparing apples with apples. For some of the more advanced functionalities, though, it can be more expensive. Analytics Cloud is subscription-based. There are different tiers of licensing that give you different access to different functionalities, but assuming you have all of that, there is no additional hosting or set up costs, its fully included in the price per user. 

It's really important to think about data governance in the solution because it's very much a self-service application. It can be quite open for users to create their own versions of data, so it's really important that you think about customers, think about a data governance model to make sure that there's clear ownership of data, and there's a clear single source of truth for enterprise data in the model. It's easy to create a situation where it's open, but you still very much need to consider having a data governance strategy that underpins your Analytics Cloud implementation.

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

The solution is used for planning and budgeting.

The SKU, the story build all are user- friendly. For the story build one just has to drag and drop it. And for the table, you just need some sort of selections and everything there.

There is plenty of room for improvement. They have different products, and you need to integrate all of them to have one functionality. For example, data extraction happens in Datasphere. Then it would be best if you had some connection between the Datasphere and the SAP Analytics Cloud to get the data, as this is causing headaches sometimes. The knowledge base and Jedox also could be more meaningful. I have tried to search for some specific knowledge base and technology base, and I didn't find them. I have learned it by trial and error.

There is room to improve the integrations between the different products. The AFS, and the Data action, need improvement. Sometimes they release new tools and updates, but not in my area.

I have been using the solution for twelve months.

It is a stable product. I rate the stability a nine out of ten.

It is a scalable solution. Fourteen consultants are using the SAP Cloud for planning and budgeting and are impressed with it as they did not introduce any other tool. I rate the scalability a nine out of ten.

Since it is a stable tool we did not have to contact the technical support team.

The initial setup is a little difficult. It takes time to learn about the Datasphere and the SEB. Actually, I have joined an ongoing project, so I didn't know how much time it would take.

I rate the overall solution a nine out of ten.