Monday, May 20, 2013

HILO = SAPVisi = Photon = SAP Lumira

One of last week SAPphirenow (14-16 may 2013) outcomes was announcement of new name for SAP Visual Intelligence. From this time on the new name is SAP Lumira. Tool initially started as project HILO as new generation of data visualization software. Yep! Even after all tools acquired from BusinessObjects SAP indented to create a new tool. Just needed to say that project was driven within BusinessObjects portfolio particularly in what is BusinessObjects Explorer. HILO was Desktop Edition of BusinessObjects Explorer. Around spring of 2012 it was aimed to access, manipulate and match up data in order to create rich, beautiful and highly interactive data visualizations. 
Then moving to end of 2012 year a Visual Intelligence (in short SAPVisi) was chosen as new name. It was the data manipulation and visualization tool. Enables to connect various data sources, select and clean data, manipulate and visualize data with a diverse offer of graphical charts and tables. SAP Visual Intelligence can be installed locally and can operate on data either remotely or on locally stored datasets. The outputs (e.g. charts) created (in format .SViD) can be saved as files and sent out by email. File is a document that contains the data source connection information, the data definition and data, and the visualizations. Datasets can be published to SAP Hana, and documents published to SAP Streamwork activities, etc.

Early in 2013 a project "Photon" came in to the game. It represents SAP’s move to cloud analytics. There are some companies (e.g. gooddata) which came with this concept earlier. Cloud analytics is a service model in which elements of the data analytics process are provided through a public or private cloud. In broader terms cloud analytics can be service like hosted data warehouses, software-as-a-service business intelligence (SaaS BI known as on-demand BI or cloud BI) and cloud-based social media analytics. SaaS BI may involve delivery of BI apps to users from a hosted/cloud location. Photon is set to materialize SAPVisi in forms like self-service data visualization in the cloud. It remains to be part of SAP’s BI OnDemand.
Finally last week Photon got official name SAP Lumira. Lumira positioned as new innovation for self-service BI. Lumira comes on two flavors, as:

SAP Lumira – Desktop app
SAP Lumira Cloud – Cloud app

BTW: SAP BusinessObjects Explorer stays stand-alone as Lumira and Explorer are complementary and integrated. SAP Lumira allows Analysts to load, mash-up and manipulate data and then share their results back into SAP BusinessObjects Explorer for distribution over the web and onto mobile devices. See FAQs.

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2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi Sapper,

I wold like to know the prime technical difference between SAP Lumira & SAP BO Explorer

Martin Maruskin said...

Hi Kiran,

from technical perspective BO Explorer is part of BI 4.x Platform. So you need to have BI4 deployed in order to use it. On other hand Lumira is either a cloud based solution - you need just web browser or it is desktop application (thick client).

regards, sapper