SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio provides data visualizations for BI apps. dashboards and business intelligence apps.
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SAP Lumira Discovery
Score 7.7 out of 10
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SAP Lumira Discovery is SAP’s data visualization and discovery application. It facilitates data discovery, visualization, and analysis by assisting users with creation of dashboards, infographics, presentations, data facets, tag clouds, and more.
SAP Business Objects is well suited for the scenarios where most of the logic is written on the backend (in some other application) and one can expose that data for the business users through Business Objects. It is easy to schedule the report, format the same and download the data for analysis. Some simple calculations can also be added on the BO side as needed It is not very appropriate for complex calculations/logic.
Infographics derived from specific data sources appears to be well suited for development using Lumira. The development of executive level dashboards was less appropriate from my perspective. The software does not provide sufficient demonstration or samples for the users to learn from in my opinion.
Even though the process of creating visualizations of data is now greatly improved, it could still be a lot better as users become accustomed to this kind of tool and bring forward edge cases the developers did not anticipate.
It would be awesome to have a cross platform tool that works on more than just Windows.
SAP Lumira is very good self service analytical tool with powerful capabilities. However need to look into other SAP products in BI space, like SAP SAC. SAP Lumira is more used for custom and complex analytical need in business intelligence area. Also SAP Lumira is going out of maintenance in coming future replaced by SAP SAC.
Lumira is a desktop application runs in its own JVM. It installs its own java runtime libraries to avoid any core java version conflicts. The availability of the application is completely relies on individual machine hardware configuration. On a decent desktop, it performs well and always launches in either 32 or 64 bit environment based on the hosts system's OS
The performance is linear with amount of data that is being explored. We have done some benchmarks acquiring 10million data cells without having any performance problems. We need to make proper adjustments to jvm run time properties to start with higher heap size and other parameters that optimizes the run time performance
It does not have many bugs or issues since not a lot of new features are being added. The customer support for SAP Lumira Discovery is good and anyone considering this as a self-service tool would be happy. It integrates well in the SAP BI suite of products and the overall experience is positive.
Most of the user guides are pretty comprehensive and very easy to understand. The product itself is designed to be self-serve tool, did not need much of the end-user training. Most of the training we had is to how to read the data, how to explore the data, how to acquire the data etc.
Installing the desktop software on end-user machines is always challenging. The machine specifications are the biggest factor when running Lumira and be able to handle large datasets during data exploration. This often demands beefy machines at least for power-users. Although Lumira software licensing is not a big problem but managing partner's extensions and keeping track of their individual licenses may be an issue. If there is a way to bundle the more popular extensions such as vSQL or vOLAP should be bundled in core product and offer them as part of Lumira license instead of a separate license which causer operational burden.
Other offering include PowerBI and Tableau. Both alternatives have different licensing options to consider, in terms of capabilities, they increase in conjunction with the license price.
Even though SAP Analytics Cloud is considered to be better in aspects such as data connectivity or analytics, we decided to choose Lumira as it was easier to understand, learn and use. As our business is not really that big and does not require the inclusion of large amounts of data, Lumira was overall the safest and most comfortable option. Also, some members in our team had previous knowledge so it was easier to adapt
Enterprise wide implementation is a challenge with data security and trustedness. No easy installation can be done across the enterprise. no upgrade paths also available from SAP. They have so much of experience with desktop implementation, there it could be a controlled environment with a capital budget. These may be resolved in the upcoming releases
