SAP Business Data Cloud Reviews

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.

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.

My VP asked me to work with my plan number to figure out how to increase and support our sales region. On the planning admin, I created a model and then imported actual and forecasted data. From that, I was able to determine the variance. We managed to plan this with small amounts of data. 

We created a planning model and enabled it to make a planning checkmark that works with the time category in the tab dimension, in order to bring it down to the lowest granularity, by month, start date, and end date. 

We created an organization dimension. A responsible person to monitor each region is required. Then you can drag and drop the region hierarchy from the parent.

Then, we worked on the calculated numbers, for example, the gross margin, which was the total revenue minus COGS. We then divided that number by total revenue times one hundred. From there, we could pull the data from the file and select source actuality to validate it. 

We performed all of this using SAP Analytics Cloud.

In the most recent release, the schedule publication was officially updated and it's been added on MS Office 365. I like how we had an EPM for B to C perspective; it's a great enhancement. Also, I believe the B to B connectivity has been improved. Android support for mobile is really good also. Power BI has always had android support in place, so manual support for SAP Analytics Cloud is also a very good feature.

Smart Insights have also been enhanced, especially in regards to the Stories.

Apart from that, I would like to see more data-handling enhancement. Smart planning can give us immediate results.  When we come to analytics, If we could get more enhancement, we could probably completely skip the data warehousing concepts. This would be a big improvement.

With all of the new updates, now we can combine different types of data together and give our customers a full picture. 

I am happy with the new release that is coming out. It's comparatively a little slower than the version we had from 2019-2020; however, the enhancements they have added are much better than previous versions.

The most valuable feature is that we can allocate, spread, and distribute the actual figures.

The cost is an area that could be improved. I also think that Ofice 365 should be incorporated. People would find it to be more user-friendly with Office 365 integrated. Flat file integration can be a distinguishing factor.

Custom visuals is another area of improvement. There are also some mobile features that are missing. There are features that aren't available on the mobile. 

There should also be better connectivity tools for HANA and Success Factors. They have minimal visualization relations and they have the third-party add-ins.

I have been using this solution for the past six months.

We have 300-plus Stories that we already had in the system, that we had to do performance tuning. I brought it down to 267, to be exact. We had over 302 dashboards and then we brought it down to 111 stories on 267 visualizations. When we have too many pages, the performance gets impacted a little on the initialization part. When we open the story, it takes a little bit of time because it's not on-premise. Because our clients are based in the Netherlands and we are based in Bangalore, we had to manage the different time zones, and the business hours are different. We had to find out during the peak business hour how the SSE behaves.

We found that in the peak business hours it does slow down a little bit, considering the internet speed and everything. We did take everything into account. Then we checked the performance and the data also. In order to be competitive with the other software in the market, a little enhancement in this part also would give the upper hand compared to other BI tools.

We used to go in a cognitive window wherein we don't have any caches in place, so that we could get an accurate picture of the performance. But we also want to reduce the number of filters, and then we want to do more slicing and dicing across the data and try to see how it improves. In the near future, we would try to test the data more.

It performs quite well. Custom visuals would definitely help us to improve a little more. 

There are more viewer licenses. We have got close to 130 users for Analytics Cloud. And for developer access, for read and write, at our location we have around six plus two for planning, altogether 11 to 12 licenses. 

We have BW HANA. So we have only four developers as of now. We used it more extensively before the pandemic but not as much now. We do have plans to increase usage in the near future. 

The technical support is quite good. Any time there is a new release and we have any issues, we connect with the technical support team and then go ahead and write about it in a blog so that the other users can also get help for similar issues. 

We previously used Cognos Analytics and Tableau. I've done a couple of POCs on Tableau and worked on micro-strategy. We switched to SAP Analytics Cloud primarily for the planning, development, and the user-friendliness. When SAP comes up with a solution, they definitely try to be up to market. The features were not in a premature stage. We had faith that SAP had enhanced features compared to other BI tools.

The initial setup was pretty easy. It was also easy for my team. They thought it was easy to install. There's no download, there was no complexity.

We do the maintenance for it because we know the ins and outs of the development. We also do the admin.

If you are new to SSE and are trying to implement SSE in your project, don't think that SSE is an SAP product. Look into the features because I am sure you'll be satisfied with the features. They come out with the releases. I go into the release notes to understand what are the enhancements are. This will make it easier to understand. 

If you have somebody who isn't as experienced with BI, even that person can still learn SSE and can cope up with the BI requirements. In India, if you want to be a BI compatible, you have to have at least three years' experience so that you can understand all of the data warehousing concepts, and EDL. With SSE, learning is very smooth and easy.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. 

The missing point would be because of the performance. 

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.

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.

The most valuable feature of SAP Analytics Cloud is its integration with SAP.

SAP Analytics Cloud should improve the dashboard.

I have been using SAP Analytics Cloud for approximately two years.

The stability of SAP Analytics Cloud is good.

I rate the stability of SAP Analytics Cloud a nine out of ten.

We are using SAP Analytics Cloud 24 hours a day.

I have used other solutions in the past. Microsoft Power BI has more powerful features, such as a dashboard, overall management, and maintenance.

The initial setup of SAP Analytics Cloud can take a couple of hours.

I recommend that companies using SAP consider not investing in separate analytics solutions in order to fully leverage the benefits of integration. This is because SAP utilizes the same database for administrative functions, such as Oracle for the ART. Consequently, the database itself does not offer significant advantages, as a connector is established between Oracle and other systems. While real-time integration is achievable, it does not adhere to the standard approach. Specifically, SAP S4HANA employs the HANA database for analytics while utilizing the Oracle database for ERP purposes. Therefore, it would be more beneficial for companies using SAP S4HANA to opt for SAP Analytics Cloud.

I rate SAP Analytics Cloud a seven out of ten.

We use SAP Analytics Cloud mainly to get insights into the customer data, such as what type of orders, the type of customers, and correlations among the orders. For example, we also get insights on cash flow, the frequency of orders, and causes for unfulfilled orders.

The data we get from SAP Analytics Cloud is more analytical, where we try to analyze what happened. Based on our analysis, our customers can explain the pitfalls in their current systems.

What my customers like best about SAP Analytics Cloud is the dashboard because it's pretty good.

I also find the data extraction feature, where you extract data to an Excel sheet, useful.

One area for improvement in SAP Analytics Cloud is incorporating Python into the coding. That functionality is available, but it's not as efficient, and it's a bit difficult sometimes to do it, so that could be improved.

Compared to the IBM solution, per many of my customers, SAP Analytics Cloud is less user-friendly than IBM, so this is another area for improvement.

I've worked with SAP Analytics Cloud for more than a year and still use it, though it's not every day that I use it. My usage of SAP Analytics Cloud is on and off based on the client's requirements. My company is an SAP solutions provider, but it doesn't often get requests for SAP Analytics Cloud here in India.

Looking at my period of usage for SAP Analytics Cloud, it seems long, but the actual work is not so much. Sometimes, there's none. The last time I worked with the solution was one month ago.

SAP Analytics Cloud is stable, so my company hasn't received many complaints from a stability point of view.

The scalability of SAP Analytics Cloud is eight out of ten.

My company hasn't had the opportunity to work with enormous data because clients only had a few hundred GBs of data, so not a very big database to work with, but then, with SAP HANA coming in, it's becoming easier to deal with the data. It's much more efficient to handle larger data sets versus connecting with SAP ECC. Connecting to SAP HANA makes the process more efficient and the data transfer much more effortless.

The support for SAP Analytics Cloud could use some improvement because if the client is pretty important, my company receives faster replies from the support team. However, it takes longer for technical support to reply and resolve the issues if the client isn't that big.

I'd rate SAP technical support as six on a scale of one to ten.

Neutral

I was also involved in one or two projects trying to connect SAP Analytics Cloud with IBM Analytics, and it was a good experience, but I haven't worked with an IBM solution. Still, I feel IBM is more flexible because it uses different languages versus SAP Analytics Cloud, where you have to use SAP proprietary language by default. You can use other languages, but you need to do some configurations first, while IBM, out of the box, supports multiple languages, so that's the big difference between SAP Analytics Cloud and IBM Analytics.

The initial setup for SAP Analytics Cloud was pretty easy, primarily because my company only works with SAP solutions, so connecting SAP Analytics Cloud to an SAP environment was easy, with not much hassle.

My company works with multiple solutions, including SAP Analytics Cloud and traditional BI tools.

Because of the SAP partnership, my company doesn't get data from other systems; instead, it only uses data from SAP to create all data services.

Overall, SAP Analytics Cloud is a good solution, and if you're dealing exclusively with SAP products, then it's a good marriage. It's a seven on a scale of one to ten.

I recommend the solution to others because it's excellent. It's a good fit in the overall landscape of SAP.

My company is an SAP partner.