SAP Information Management, Intelligent Technologies & Consulting Services

SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC)

Why SAC?

Connecting to your back-end system

Live Connection

Acquired Data

SAC Application Design

Differences with Lumira Designer

Why SAC?

Updated on 09.2019

Here are some advantages:

New SAP functionalities and developments will follow a Cloud First approach. It is clearly the way to go.
SAP is putting a lot of effort on this tool. He is trying to gain market share against Microsoft Porwer BI, Tableau, QlikView and SAS.
It is a one for all tool: Business Intelligence, Planning, Advanced Analytics and Application Design.
It comes with many "Smart" Assistants for the user.

Main drawbacks:

Versions are changing every three months. Wait, you told me that this was an advantage! It is both, actually. For instance, be ready to update your BW or SAP Source System every three months as well, or you will need to apply a bunch of notes till the product stabilizes. Otherwise most of the new functionalities may not work well.
The learning curve can be challenging as well (it will anyway since SAP became Agile, but not the Customers) with new releases coming up before you get used to what you have just learned. Anyway, remember that Goolgle recommends their employees to spend 20% of their time "preparing for the future", so it is not a choice not to keep up-to-date as much as possible.
It is imcomplete and in quick evolution. That's why you see the date in most of my entries. Every other week there are still patches that may actually break your existing reports. We all know it is developed by Business Object, which has a different Quality culture as SAP.

So it is clear: the advantages outnumber the drawbacks, right?

My recommendation: use the Cloud for innovation. For critical reporting, it is more sensible to use more mature front-end tools at this moment.

Connecting to your back-end system

Updated 09.2019

There are two types of connections to back-end systems: Live Connection and Data Acquisition. Functionalities are quite different at this moment.

Live Connection

If your main concern is your data security, then use Live Connection, as according to SAP, only your metadata will be exchaged with the Cloud (things like a filter value, for instance, hich may sound like data to you).

Exceptions: (they must be activated in the SAC settings).

If you blend Live and Acquired Data, your Live Data will be exposed.
If you use and R-Script, your data will be sent to the R-Server
Using Smart Grouping and Forecasting in Time Series Graphs.

One important limitation for Live Connections to BW is that Master Data Hierearchies are not available. You can sidestep this limitation by using the HANA Hierarchies instead. You can find further details in this blog: Activate Master Data Hierarchies for SAC

Acquired Data

If you need to use planning (which is a different license with a higher cost) then you must acquire the data. SAP is working to make planning available to Live Connection.

SAC Application Design

Created on 07.2019

Most customers love to readapt the standard visualizations and build their own ones, so that IT can build amazingly expensive to sustain solutions. According to SAP, the target should be to simplify navigation and improve user experience. In reality, many of these ad-hoc dashboards end-up in very complex developments with lack of governance. That keeps IT busy while business users have no time for testing the new changes. These are some of the reasons why an Application Design was essential to SAC.

More seriously, if you want a complete review, you can find it on this serie of blogs:

https://visualbi.com/blogs/category/sap/sap-analytics-cloud/application-design/

https://blogs.sap.com/2019/03/27/application-design-with-sap-analytics-cloud-overview-and-road-map-webcast-recap-qa/

You can also find a short video introduction here:

Differences with Lumira Designer

There are some differences with Lumira Designer, the on-premise counterpart.You can find a good list in VisualBI. This will evolve quickly, anyway.

The main ones are: different connection capabilities(actually better for SAC), in Data Binding (there is no DataSource object to be reused, instead a Data Model must be created, even for Live Connections) and the number of available components. Last, but not least, scripting language is somehow different.

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