What needs improvement with SAP Analytics Hub?

With SAP's AI capabilities in SAP Business Data Cloud, there are some parts integrated, but I am not convinced or impressed as much as I am with traditional data warehousing. For example, there was one component called data generator available in SAP Business Data Cloud. It was transforming a previously built data model in BW to the DataSphere model. However, we have seen some disturbances where the data model built on custom functional modules needs human dependency. It was not transforming exactly as much as our requirement. That is one point. The second point is about the Insight app; I am not that happy about this. It can be improved. For the Insight apps, they need to be shared through other reporting platforms because of client requirements. One of my clients was from the manufacturing sector and wanted to try the Insight app. They wanted some reports in SAC and some reports in Power BI. However, the Insight app is not available; we cannot share this Insight app to Power BI. That was the issue we faced. This is a limitation. In SAP Business Data Cloud, to help different AI assistants stay in sync and share the same business rules so they do not give conflicting information, I feel SAP still builds all these AI capabilities into a closed system. If you compare other data engineering stacks, they are openly integrating and partnering with other platforms. They are much more advanced and much more ahead of their time in comparison to SAP Business Data Cloud. SAP Business Data Cloud does support AI or ML enabled with new use cases in our organization. There are some apps we want to develop, and it is not only limited to SAP Business Data Cloud. We are trying to integrate Joule capabilities into SAP Business Data Cloud. For example, if we are doing a greenfield implementation, on top of these tables, we have to create the CDS view for optimized extraction. In that case, we are trying to do this CDS extraction and CDS code writing using Joule AI automation. That is something SAP could directly integrate into SAP Business Data Cloud. It will save us time. Second, they have given the product generator, so remodeling is a bit easy. The third point is about reporting. The Insight app is not something I am happy with overall. The Insight app concept was not giving end-to-end functionality, and there is a limited scope of customization into that pre-built Insight app. SAP can work on improving this.

SAP Business Data Cloud could be improved by publishing broad guidelines on how to handle it correctly, perhaps specifying certain things not to do. For instance, my current structure requires extracting, transforming, and loading data, but Business Data Cloud operates more in BW modeling in HANA mode. You still need your SQL joins, but you only need to persist data when necessary. If it can introduce agents to accelerate data modeling or aid development, that would provide extra flexibility. For example, if I need to make customizations, I could define specifications, and an agent could develop that on BTP and integrate it with my BDC, giving me additional flexibility and a better time to value from the development cycle while adhering to SAP's recommended coding standards. I would not honestly give any product a perfect rating. However, one area where Snowflake has gained traction is dynamic workload management. I am uncertain if SAP Business Data Cloud provides that feature, but if I have certain reporting demands and the system is at its limit, jobs can fail. It should offer automated workload management, and while SAP can charge for it, such a feature would prevent higher workloads from causing system failures and disruptions.

SAP Business Data Cloud can improve by reducing the licensing cost because each level requires clients or partners to pay different licenses based on its functionalities. For instance, if we purchase SAP Business Data Cloud only for SAC, we pay the SAC licensing, and if we also purchase Data Sphere, we then pay for Data Sphere licensing, Databricks licensing, and BW bridge licensing. At each step, partners or organizations requiring SAP Business Data Cloud pay licensing for every tool. If we can reduce the licensing cost, it may help small or medium organizations to implement SAP Business Data Cloud, making it more popular globally. My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing of SAP Business Data Cloud is that it is very high compared to implementation costs. If we could reduce this cost based on capacity units, then small and medium organizations could also avail themselves of this opportunity.

SAP Business Data Cloud can be improved as some of the features from BWPC are still not available in the Data Product Generator. Including features such as multi-provider or legacy BW object access could be helpful. Also, if connections to third-party tools such as Power BI and Tableau can improve, it would enhance customer interaction. Additionally, if SAP can come up with innovative options to reduce licensing costs, many customers would incline toward SAP Business Data Cloud since some are currently moving towards non-SAP tools such as Fabric, Databricks, or BigQuery due to cost constraints. The performance when utilizing the zero-copy data share via BDC Connect could be improved, as it would be very useful for most customers who start using it. Right now, some customers face issues because of BDC Connect. I have already mentioned all of the issues I faced, so I don't have additional improvements to add.

I think the areas of SAP Analytics Cloud that could be improved or enhanced are mentioned by users or companies, and they would definitely mention the price in terms of planning licensing. From a consulting point of view, I don't see any major weaknesses. It is reasonably well-developed, and the perfect strength is that innovations are coming on a quarterly basis. It is slightly behind other tools in terms of the number of graphical outputs. Some tools have it faster, but every increment of innovations contains new features. On the other hand, it is perfectly fitting to the SAP environment, with seamless integration to all SAP modules, not only ERP but also SuccessFactors and other tools from the SAP family, for example, integrated business planning for the production planning. This is really a highlight compared to other tools.

The search function in SAP Analytics Hub is not effective. When speaking about integration with various analytic sources, for example, if I wanted to send the data from SAP BW or B4HANA to a data lake, we used to earlier use the Open Data Hub or Analytics Hub. Nowadays, we are using the Data Sphere integrators available with Amazon, Azure, and Google Cloud. The search capability could be better, and SAP needs to come out with a clear roadmap for the solution going ahead, as they have not yet provided that.

The platform could easily integrate with other ERP data solutions. Additionally, it should be faster compared to competitors in the cloud space.

SAP does not have any capability of self-service analytics. It has a GUI, which has nothing to do with end-user empowerment. It should work more on integration. While SAP Analytics Hub doesn't directly allow manual metric creation from uploaded Excel files, it seamlessly connects to various data sources, including Excel files, to create comprehensive analytics and visualizations.

Faster implementation of new functions for the new product is an area of improvement in SAP Analytics Hub.

Pricing and support are integrated into the system. However, the support process can be challenging, particularly when navigating the SAP support site, which lacks user-friendliness and ease of access. A good level of understanding is needed to use the system efficiently. Users who are unfamiliar with the topic area may find this difficult.

The technical support for Analytics Hub is limited and could be improved. It is very difficult to import data from other products, such as Power BI. In general, it doesn't integrate well with non-SAP products.

There is a steep learning curve with SAP Analytic Cloud for others from Non-SAP world, compared to other cloud solutions like Azure, GCP, AWS etc. Access to SAP training labs are a challenge compared to other vendors and the learning content can be structured better. Now, the content is spread across developer forum. Practice labs can be improved. Specific learning paths are not available for some of their products like SAP Data Intelligence which needs to be integrated with SAP Analytics Cloud and there are no hands on Labs to practice SAP DI on Access. The learning interfaces on Developer forum can be more user-friendly experience. learning experiences on GCP & Azure are a breeze.

The analytics part of SAP has not been that good up until now. They're still in the infant stage and development is still going on. SAP has some cloud analytics and they're trying to configure it in Lumira, but it's not that good at this point.