What is our primary use case?
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 is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
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.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
SAP Analytics Cloud is stable, so my company hasn't received many complaints from a stability point of view.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
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.
How are customer service and support?
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.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
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.
How was the initial setup?
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.
What other advice do I have?
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.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner