SAP Analytics Cloud Reviews

We mainly use Analytics Cloud because it integrates with other SAP solutions. Our ERP is an SAP product, and our back-end is SAP Business Warehouse, so integration is an essential factor.

SAP could add some more visualization features to Analytics Cloud, like charts and analytics. I would also like to see some more data cleaning and ad hoc functions added to this solution.

I've been using SAP Analytics Cloud for almost three years now.

We have around 1,500 people using Analytics Cloud. Everyone from the lowest interns to the C-level suite uses it. 

I rate SAP support seven out of 10. It's good but not at the expected level.

Setting up Analytics Cloud is straightforward because it's a cloud service provided by SAP. Once you sign the contract, they give you the URL, and you can use the product. Everything is out of the box.

We considered Microsoft BI, but it didn't have the same seamless integration with SAP.

I would rate SAP Analytics Cloud seven out of 10 because the product needs to mature a lot. SAP still needs to add several features to make it a robust BI solution. For example, they should improve the charts and table components.

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.

We are a solution provider and this is one of the solutions that we implement for our clients.

The filtering options are useful.

The user interface is quite good for developing reports out of models.

There is no direct connector from SAP to Redshift, so we are required to use a third-party product that was recommended by SAP. Going forward, we would like to use connectors that are developed by SAP directly and do not require us to pay any additional licensing fees. In general, this solution should support as many databases and data warehouses, including cloud-based deployments, as possible.

There are a couple of complex reports that we cannot generate using a live connection. With the full data option, however, it is possible.

Hierarchies are not supported as of now, so it would be great if there were support for two or three-level hierarchies. It is helpful when we can drill down further into the hierarchy.

I would like to see more enhancement in terms of AI and ML. Currently, they have R visualization support in the product using a direct plugin. We need to have support for Python scripting, as well.

I am a consultant and I have been working with SAP Analytics Cloud for six months.

The solution itself is stable as of now, but we have had some challenges with connectivity. We're not sure if it is related to SAP or AWS, and it is stable at the moment, but we have had challenges.

With respect to scalability, we have only uploaded about half a million records as a pilot for the customer. At this point, we are not pushing more because we don't have the data. We do have plans to build in that regard, but for now, we cannot fully judge scalability.

We are developing solutions for enterprise-level companies.

The technical support is fine, and we have not had a problem. The SAP expert team is there if you need to speak with them.

Most of the technical support we are getting is from the marketplace. We get very good information from the SAP support portal.

For analytics, I have been working with SAP for the past twenty years. I have used the on-premises solution of business intelligence.

The initial setup is straightforward. The first time we deployed this solution it took between three and five days. This was due to some complexity that we had, including connectors. After our first experience, it now takes a maximum of two days to deploy if we have the proper documentation and connectors.

We have also recently tried Tableau and they are also pretty good. I do not find much difference between them. It is, however, the choice of the customer.

Some people like the Tableau reporting, whereas others like the SAC reporting, and it is based on the data being reported. SAC is pretty new on the market so Tableau is more flexible in terms of legacy support. A good example is Redshift. Tableau has a direct connection and SAC does not.

We have also used QlikView in the past.

We are trying to get the reports out of AWS Redshift. We are consolidating all of our data in the Amazon Data Lake, and we have it in AWS S3. It is from there that we are pushing to Redshift, but we had a challenge because there is no native connector.

This is a solution that I recommend to anybody with SAP in their landscape. We used to prefer QlikView and Tableau, but as of now, I suggest trying SAP Analytics Cloud to see the results first. There is a lot of seamless integration and you can avoid a lot of licensing costs. It is also pretty good at connecting multiple SAP systems together. It is quite useful in terms of data connectivity, data transmission, and modeling. 

Our customers definitely prefer SAP Analytics Cloud on Amazon Redshirt, regardless of the third-party connector that we had to use.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

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 version was launched about a month ago. We are in partnership with SAP, we're gold members. We implement SAP a lot. Working with open-source data in terms of Google Drive. 

The primary use case is working with open-source data in terms of Google Drive and other platforms. The environment currently runs on SAP, so SAP Analytics Cloud is a good way to go. The client can get value for money, instead of having to bring Oracle into an environment in which the integration might be clumsy. It makes sense to have SAP on the ground because they are running currently on HANA, which is why SAP was the first option on the list.

I love a lot of things about the product. The first is Smart Discovery and Smart Insight. It's amazing having predictive analysis and AI algorithms. A second valuable feature about SAP Analytics Cloud is the fact that it integrates with third-party applications such as Google Drive and Excel, which is amazing. Also the look and feel of the product, the user experience is very, very intuitive and the collaborative support that you have within the solution means you can share pictures, make comments, etc. It's very collaborative.

Improvement could be made in the pricing of the product which is very expensive, more than Oracle and Power BI and similar solutions. Currently, only one data modeler can work at a time. If you're working on a project and you have five data modelers, for example, if person A corrects or makes a change, person B won't see it. It makes it difficult because if you have three or four modelers working on the project, everybody should be able to work seamlessly without having to disturb one another. That's my only negative about SAP Analytics.

In the next release, I think they need to have voice-driven analytics, rather than just clicking and texting as it is now. A voice to text solution would make it funkier and more amazing. A move to include Android mobile platforms, would also be good, currently, it only works with iPhones and other Apple products. The number of people using Android is huge, so if they can extend the mobile platform to Android it'll be great. 

I've been using the product for about seven months. 

Though it is a relatively new solution, it is stable. 

I've been in touch with technical support because SAP has a presence in Nigeria. We can also get support from South Africa, and that was really helpful. 

I think deployment took us about a month and I think that was because this was very, very robust. Once you're able to get the data models it's just a matter of uploading.

The client actually wanted SAP. We checked other vendors to see if they could match what SAP could offer.

The program runs on the cloud. We push the data from the source offline entirely in the cloud, and the cloud takes over the analytics. It's a bit of a hybrid solution for now but we are thinking of moving fully into the cloud so that everything just happens in the cloud, and we get our insights and our KPIs displayed on the dashboard.

There can always be improvements and updates are coming in regularly but if you can afford this solution I would say 'go for it!' 

For now, I would rate this product an eight out of 10. 

I primarily use SAP Analytics Cloud for developing automated reports and for developing dashboards. The BW takes queries and provides the reports and dashboards.

I find the linking analysis, blending and predictive analysis features most valuable. Additionally, Smart Insights is a good feature.

It would be helpful if it had multiple PowerPoint marks built-in so that it could be shown in PowerPoint presentations. It would also be helpful if you could download this external content onto the Flash File.

I began using SAP Analytics Cloud a few months back.

Up until now I have not encountered any kind of stability issues.

Right now we have 30 to 40 users using it, with plans to increase.

There is no problem with SAP Analytics Cloud support. I do think there should be some training provided. We only have eBooks. I don't think we have any kind of e-learning. It would be good to have SAP training for Analytics Explorer, including some instructor-led training.

The initial setup is straightforward. 

Deploying SAP Analytics goes from development to production. It doesn't take much time and is very quick. Setup depends upon the requirements as well as the back-end work to be done.

It's usually around two hours or less. 

When deploying SAP Analytics Cloud, they should provide documentation on clear steps regarding the migration. 

We implemented it ourselves.

Regarding pricing, I don't know exactly how much it is. I am not aware of the price.

I would advise anyone looking into SAP Analytics Cloud to go for it.

One a scale of 1 - 10 I would rate it an 8. To raise that score they need more exporting options.

• We use this across the organization to share data via the cloud solution and present to businesses and clients. 
• We use it to visually graph data and view trends. 
• Having it available from the cloud helps us have real-time data and collaboration across teams.

It supports better decision-making across organization. Real-time data makes for a single version of the truth. This helps teams work together and effectively analyse trends and performance metrics.

The stories have really been helpful in looking at specific scenarios and analyzing trends over periods of time. We work with a lot of financial metrics and being able to track performance over time is imperative.

Microsoft and Tableau are market leaders in my opinion. They have more advanced features and more depth in the stories' functionality, for example. We need to know that we are using the latest and greatest, and SAP appears as if it has lost some credibility in the market.

We use this solution as part of an embedded analytics use case for an ERP application. SAP are starting to embed Analytics Cloud as a solution within their ERP application, which gives you the options for closed-loop analytics, as you go from insights to action within a single ERP application. It can also be used to bring together multiple data sources, different sources of data from various applications and use the application to blend and trade analytics solutions across different parts of the organization. The product suits small to large enterprise, it supports all user types. We are partners with SAP and I'm an analytics practice lead.  

A point of differentiation in the market for Analytics Cloud compared to other analytics products, is it offers not only business intelligence within the application, but also it has inbuilt AI and machine learning capabilities that can be used not only by data scientist types in the organization, but for general users who can get the benefit of inbuilt predictive features in the tool. The other really compelling part of it is that it's also a planning application. You can do full life cycle from plan through execution in a single platform. That's quite unique for SAP. A lot of the other software vendors do analytics products and they do planning products. This is quite a unique combination that has both BI predictive and planning in a single application. And that's really where its strengths is.

I think what could be improved is a lot of those intelligent features that I mentioned, the AI and predictive functions within the tool work really well with data that you import into the platform, but it doesn't work as well with SAP live connections. If they could make those predictive features available to any source, whether it's SAP or non SAP, it would be a really, really compelling product. 

I'd like to see formatted reporting as an additional feature, such as pixel perfect style formatted reporting. I'd also like to see the product on parity when you compare acquired data and live data models, to know that the features are identical. 

I've been using this solution for two years. 

I believe the stability needs more work. The product was first released about five years ago and it's still maturing, which means a lot of new functionality is released with each update. Sometimes that can be a little bit disruptive as features change. 

The scalability is pretty good, you've got options of either having it publicly hosted, or you can also have a private hosting option in a restricted area in the cloud data center. You can also add capacity to it quite easily. It's elasticity as an application for scale-out is pretty good. And underneath the covers, it runs SAP HANA, which is an in-memory database. So that makes a pretty performance. I'm happy with it. 

The technical support could be improved. 

I would say that Analytics Cloud is definitely improving although it's not yet fully comparable. There are some features in BusinessObjects that are not yet in Analytics Cloud, but I would say, from my perspective, that the overall the benefits and advantages of using SAC outweigh BusinessObjects. 

Initial setup is somewhere in the middle of straightforward and complex, it just depends on the source of information. It's not overly simple and it's not overly complex. We have the solution up and running with customers in three weeks for a trial, and that's sending up the application, connecting it to their source systems and demonstrating one really good example of a dashboard or report. We carry out the deployment internally. There's very little maintenance required because it's software as a service, a SaaS offering, a lot of that housekeeping and maintenance and upgrade of the solution is managed by SAP, by the software vendors. Again, that's one of its strong selling points, it requires very little administration overhead.

I believe that SAC is cheaper than BusinessObjects for a basic user license. It's difficult to compare because one is an on-premise pricing model and the other is subscription based. You're not really comparing apples with apples. For some of the more advanced functionalities, though, it can be more expensive. Analytics Cloud is subscription-based. There are different tiers of licensing that give you different access to different functionalities, but assuming you have all of that, there is no additional hosting or set up costs, its fully included in the price per user. 

It's really important to think about data governance in the solution because it's very much a self-service application. It can be quite open for users to create their own versions of data, so it's really important that you think about customers, think about a data governance model to make sure that there's clear ownership of data, and there's a clear single source of truth for enterprise data in the model. It's easy to create a situation where it's open, but you still very much need to consider having a data governance strategy that underpins your Analytics Cloud implementation.

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10.