Or should that be “Goodbye corporate IT, Hello SAP Lumira”? Last Friday, on the eve of this week’s SAP SAPPHIRE event in Orlando, Florida, SAP officially launched Lumira, its new self service business intelligence solution.
Lumira isn’t entirely new. The Lumira desktop is a rebranding of SAP Visual Intelligence. You know, the year-old desktop product that was launched at last year’s SAPPHIRE? The other piece of Lumira is Lumira Cloud, which is replacing SAP’s existing On-Demand cloud BI offering. And Timo Elliott hints that the rebranding is a prelude to even larger plans SAP has for self-service BI.
We feel that it’s more appropriate to use a completely new name for a completely new “network of truth” approach to business intelligence and analytics (and “SAP Visual Intelligence Cloud” sounds clunky).
Blogger Jonathan Haun had this to say about Lumira’s launch on Twitter:
I get it. SAP Lumira helps insulate users from IT
Disagree? Check out SAP’s recent ad campaign for SAP Visual Intelligence.
Data discovery and insights that you control. Not IT.
While many still feel that SAP Visual Intelligence, uh, I mean SAP Lumira is still behind its data discovery competitors like Tableau, SAP has beaten them to the cloud [Uhhhh… Never mind – see Tableau Public]. In keeping with the “not IT” theme, SAP states in its SAP Visual Intelligence Renaming FAQ that although SAP Lumira and SAP BusinessObjects Explorer are integrated, Explorer is not being rebranded at this time. I still think the branding story remains a bit confusing (see related article, Family Planning), but by keeping separate names SAP maintains a very clear delineation between “what your IT department controls” (Explorer) and “what you control” (SAP Lumira Desktop and SAP Lumira Cloud). Curiously, Lumira relies on Explorer to get its data visualizations to mobile devices. My hunch is that SAP simply ran out of time to include Lumira Cloud integration in the Mobile BI application in time for SAPPHIRE (although Mobile BI is expected to include Explorer when the latest version appears- hopefully soon). Time will tell.
Expect SAP Lumira, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence 4.1, and the ever game-changing, kitten-killing SAP HANA to be the three big analytics themes from this week’s SAPPHIRE conference in sunny Orlando. If you’re stuck behind your desk like me, you can still follow live streaming of the conference from SAP, from ASUG, as well as the #SAPPHIRENOW and #ASUG2013 Twitter streams.
Should be an interesting week.
SAP Lumira Resources
- SAP Lumira: Why Did We Change Yet Another Perfectly Good BI Product Name? by Timo Elliott
- SAP Visual Intelligence Renaming FAQ from SAP Community Network (SCN)
- Say Hello to SAP Lumira (the Product Formerly Know as Visi) from ASUG News
- SAP renames Visual Intelligence “Lumira” and sticks it in the cloud from GigaOM
- #SAPLumira on Twitter
Attend ASUG Annual Conference/SAP SAPPHIRE vicariously
- ASUG News
- #SAPPHIRENOW on Twitter
- #ASUG2013 on Twitter
Hi Dallas,
My hunch would be that the next version of SAP Lumira is an HTML5 based application that runs on your desktop and via the browser on any device. You can simply create visualisations on data sets you aquire on the desktop and share / consume existing visualizations optionally using the SAP Lumira Cloud solution. I already saw the mock-ups for the next release on SAP Lumira and a pretty interesting new way of visualizations is going to be a part of the product.
With kind regards,
Martijn van Foeken
Thought you’d enjoy this one … Ad-Sense choose to insert a Tableau banner ad right after your sentence:
Check out SAP’s recent ad campaign for SAP Visual Intelligence.
(Lumira screenshot then right after the Tableau ad)
Aahhhh ….. now I understand why SAP did it.
They are tying up partnership with Nokia handsets to deliver the Mobile BI Solutions.
Ouuuffff! imagine …….. SAP Lumira on Nokia Lumia ….. 🙂