SAP Lumira Discovery vs. SAP Predictive Analytics

SAP Lumira helped to create intuitive and real-time dashboards in a story format to the organization. However with new capabilities of SAP, like SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) providing more planning and analytical capabilities. Thus the identification of the use cases with the available products should be done. SAC is more integrated and the go to product in SAP roadmap.

Incentivized

When you don't have much data science skills or when you need to build something quick, you can get started really fast with SAP Predictive Analytics. There are scenarios, like the ones covered by a neural network, where SAP Predictive Analytics is not well suited, but the big question is usually: "do you really need a neural network to address this use case?"

Incentivized

• Data discovery and integration with applications.
• Ability to generate visual reports with meaningful business insights.
• Integration with Microsoft office.
• Integration with SAP Cloud platform and BI tools like Tableau.
• Amazing mobile interface with responsive UI experience.
• Ability to generate visual dashboards with charts and maps.

Incentivized

• Ability to use built-in algorithms or expand using R. This means that (with training) casual users can take advantage but also data analysts can do their thing!
• Integration and consistency with Lumira. Even Lumira on its own has a quick 'predict' functionality (although limited/black box)
• Ability to do the analysis and then present visually using the Lumira visualization capabilities

Incentivized

• Control over data import formatting - for example where amount and currency values are imported there is not enough control over the transformation and formatting and this has caused us data import difficulties where values read have been truncated due to punctuation in the amount fields.
• The user interface is simplified, but the terminology and screen layout do not always make it obvious how to start the process for a new user - for example to add a new data source or create a new report.

• The "User Experience" is sometimes lacking some clear basic things. Maybe a migration to a cloud-based environment will help bridge that gap.
• API is probably the next item on my list. The existing one is not easy to access or use which limits the integration capabilities.

Incentivized

Given the scope ,maintanence , support and budget are the main drivers to deciding renewal of a software

Incentivized

It has good features, the data connectivity and merging is really good, and it has helped our IT team. Nevertheless, it can sometimes be hard to use and some of the features can be found outdated. As we don't have a lot of data, it is a decent tool for our data analytics, but I wouldn't recommend for bigger or more complex businesses with large amounts of data.

Incentivized

the UI is a bit dated and available as a desktop tool mostly.

Incentivized

Lumira is a desktop application runs in its own JVM. It installs its own java runtime libraries to avoid any core java version conflicts. The availability of the application is completely relies on individual machine hardware configuration. On a decent desktop, it performs well and always launches in either 32 or 64 bit environment based on the hosts system's OS

Incentivized

The performance is linear with amount of data that is being explored. We have done some benchmarks acquiring 10million data cells without having any performance problems. We need to make proper adjustments to jvm run time properties to start with higher heap size and other parameters that optimizes the run time performance

Incentivized

It does not have many bugs or issues since not a lot of new features are being added. The customer support for SAP Lumira Discovery is good and anyone considering this as a self-service tool would be happy. It integrates well in the SAP BI suite of products and the overall experience is positive.

Incentivized

The documentation provides an explanation about what features are available but not necessarily what's happening behind the scenes. On the other side, the "community" has grown since the acquisition and most questions are properly addressed by SAP folks. Since the "product maintenance" mode announcement was made, there wasn't much new content published except on the Smart Predict side (which is built by the SAP Predictive Analytics team)

Incentivized

We did not take in-person training

Incentivized

Most of the user guides are pretty comprehensive and very easy to understand. The product itself is designed to be self-serve tool, did not need much of the end-user training. Most of the training we had is to how to read the data, how to explore the data, how to acquire the data etc.

Incentivized

Installing the desktop software on end-user machines is always challenging. The machine specifications are the biggest factor when running Lumira and be able to handle large datasets during data exploration. This often demands beefy machines at least for power-users. Although Lumira software licensing is not a big problem but managing partner's extensions and keeping track of their individual licenses may be an issue. If there is a way to bundle the more popular extensions such as vSQL or vOLAP should be bundled in core product and offer them as part of Lumira license instead of a separate license which causer operational burden.

Incentivized

I have evaluated products such a Tableau Desktop and Splunk and the biggest difference I realized was the ability to include interactive controls in the output. For instance if I wanted to include the ability to filter by a category or filter by a date range, the controls can easily be embedded in other products.

Incentivized

We have typically used Spotfire for data analysis but decided to move to SAP Business Objects due to its innate connection with SAP. I found Lumira to be good for visualizations but it is not meant for data analysis. Therefore, we have introduced Predictive Analytics to see if it can fill that gap. So far, it's been far less intuitive than Spotfire to get started, and as far as I am aware so far, it does not bring many additional capabilities. I do, however, like that it utilizes the Lumira look/feel and integrates very well.

Incentivized

Enterprise wide implementation is a challenge with data security and trustedness. No easy installation can be done across the enterprise. no upgrade paths also available from SAP. They have so much of experience with desktop implementation, there it could be a controlled environment with a capital budget. These may be resolved in the upcoming releases

Incentivized

• We could obtain original data from vast and detailed corporate and personal data sources.
• We could share visual analysis results with stakeholders via the cloud, and it could also be viewed on a tablet.
• It is very flexible and accurate to use. It can be used for forecasting sales, resource planning, and scheduling.

• Proper forecasting increases our credibility with partners and customers
• Forecasting determines the amount of investment in each sector and reduces the cost of additional costs

Incentivized