New SAP Lumira: See The Light

As announced last Friday, SAP Visual Intelligence has been renamed to SAP Lumira (you can find the announcement and full FAQ here)

Why Did We Change Another Perfectly Good BI Product Name?

We know that this decision is likely to be met by some eye-rolling from our faithful customers who are still recovering from previous name changes.

The bottom line: we know that there are downsides to such a change, and despite the inevitable disruption it may cause, we feel it’s the right choice. Here are some of the key reasons that tipped the balance:

Family Ties. As we announced earlier this week, the next version of SAP Visual Intelligence (sorry, SAP Lumira) will offer tight integration with SAP’s next-generation cloud BI platform, SAP Lumira Cloud. 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 (oh – and “SAP Visual Intelligence Cloud” is clunky).

Searching and Sharing. SAP Lumira is a more human-friendly yet Google-ready name. As with SAP HANA (which trips off the tongue more easily than “SAP’s new platform for real-time analytics and applications”), a distinctive name makes it easier to find relevant materials (it’s one of the reasons we took the space out of “Business Objects” many years ago). And with community becoming increasingly important, this change should ultimately make it easier to find the information you need to deploy and use the products successfully (but alas, no, this doesn’t mean that Xcelsius is coming back, even if the logic is the same.)

Destined for Greatness. Although BI has been around for a long time, we believe that analytic users are still a minority. SAP Lumira aims to change that by making it easier than ever to get powerful, self-service business intelligence into the hands of everyone. We have big plans for the product that we can’t quite talk about yet, but we believe it is destined for greatness, and it’s less painful to make the switch now than later.

SAPLumira New Features

• Enhanced data manipulation capabilities, with better merge functionality, replay manipulation steps & improved formula editor
• Extended acquisition to more data sources & support different data formats during acquisition
• Empower end users to customize charts , add conditional formatting and create simple user defined views without scripting or coding
• Annotate and share your results at a click of a button on-premise or on the cloud.

Please Give Feedback and Spread the Word

If you’re reading this, you’re probably one of the people that know and use our products, and we’re very grateful. We know that changing names is disruptive, not only for you but for the business people in your organization that use our products to get insight. We’re eager to help you make the change as smooth as possible, so please let us know what we can do to help by taking part in the discussions at the SCN area. And we’d like your help to get the word out about the changes to the rest of the world (#SAPVisi is dead! Long live #SAPLumira!).

Data Geek Challenge 2.0

Looking to do something with your new product? At SAPPHIRE NOW, we’re launching the next round of the Data Geek Challenge  at www.sap.com/datageek. To enter, create an interesting view of data using SAP Lumira desktop and your data or data we’ve provided and share with the SAP Data Geek (datageek@sap.com) via SAP Lumira Cloud.