Introduction:

In almost every industry, there’s a realization that niche-related data could immensely boost decision-making if leveraged to predict patterns across every organizational channel. However, accomplishing the same requires a holistic solution that could facilitate data preparation, visualization, analytics, prediction, management alongside keeping tabs on security. 

Enter SAP Analytics Cloud. The cloud-based solution is explicitly designed to allow enterprises to discover and navigate through their data lake, develop customized reports, make informed decisions, and gain an insight into their business processes — all via an intuitive self-service interface. 

The fact that this SAP solution has found its way to the top of Ventana Research 2021 Value Index for Analytics and Data only strengthens its case. 

What is SAP Analytics Cloud?

SAP has put together Business Intelligence (BI), Augmented Analytics, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Predictive Analytics to create an all-encompassing, multi-modal analytics solution in the name of SAP Analytics Cloud. It encompasses a suite of pre-built analytic capabilities and pre-defined business content that enables easy access to real-time data and assists the business in preparing insights-driven strategies. 

The good thing is that the entire solution is available ‘as a service’ model, thus, allowing organizations to be flexible and agile while administering the analytics system, deciding on the system ownership, and even developing (designing + scripting) analytic applications.

How SAP Analytics Cloud Benefits Businesses

The benefits of an analytics-equipped IT department are myriad and instill confidence amongst the entire workforce, improve day-to-day business performance, facilitate better and swift decision making/implementation, and reduce project-related costs. 

Favorably, SAP Analytics Cloud’s features help organizations realize just that. Here’s how:

Data-Driven Analytics

Gartner ascertains that counting data analytics as a core business function under the direction of business leaders can increase a business’s value by 2.6X. From that perspective, SAP Analytics Cloud’s ability to render a 360-degree view of the data lake is simply priceless. 

Not only this, from providing system ownership to helping connect with data, the solution works to share data knowledge with every involved entity and eliminates guesswork and uncertainty. Here’s how this works for businesses:

Data Collection and Preparation: The cloud helps collect data from disparate sources, including on-premises and cloud databases. Even spreadsheets can be fed for extracting out valuable insights. Subsequently, businesses can perform data modeling wherein they can create new formulas, define hierarchical relationships, clean the dataset, etc. 

Augmented Analytics

The global augmented analytics market size has sky-rocketed in the past few years and is expected to soar through the ranks with a compound annual growth rate of 28.4% for the next four years. That would account for an industry value of USD 29,856 million at the end of 2025. 

No surprise, then, that SAP prides itself on empowering the business to extrapolate from the data while deriving invaluable insights. Powered by machine learning, the augmented analytics capability of the cloud helps organizations automate the process of discovering intelligent insights from the data while simultaneously recognizing any anomalies and devising a solution to address those anomalies. 

• Smart Insights: Through the use of natural language queries, the cloud can create visualizations. These visualizations constitute millions of data points, each of which can be expanded further by a single click. As one digs deeper into the data points, more visualizations surface, each defining the success and failure of data points. Suppose you want to know which sector (in a particular country) is performing the best. With SAP’s Smart Insights, you can very well visualize highly accurate data about your search in a matter of seconds. 

• Smart Discovery:  This feature enables correlating the KPIs with business factors. For example, if a specific ROI is a KPI, then all the data points contributing as “key influencers” to this KPI will be visualized instantly.  

Predictive Planning

Predictive capabilities within the IT functions are always at the forefront of productivity- and innovation-based discussions. Since some sort of data patching is expected to happen now and then, SAP Analytics Cloud’s predictive capabilities are the one-stop shop to ensure businesses can understand, at any point in time, the accuracy of their plan/strategy and the presumed impact of their decisions.

Perhaps the core BI potential of the solution lies in its ability to generate a comprehensive view of the entire data pool through derived multi-dimensional tables. As such, the solution enables businesses to use time-series forecasting to come up with a theory of what can happen. 

The Smart Predict solution provides the choice to set up the predictive scenarios, which can be either classification, time series, or regression. Each of these predictive scenarios pertains to a specific business decision. For instance, classification is highly preferred for binary events and time series for a set time period. Then, one can create a predictive model and help elaborate on that using the Smart Predict feature. The result is visualized (expected) information around a targeted segment.

The SAP Analytics Cloud benefits don’t end here. Following are some other great advantages associated with the use of this solution:

• Mobile responsive stories (design) can be created from SAP Analytics Cloud App
• The entire solution can be integrated with Microsoft 365 for ease of use
• Pre-built content packages can be leveraged to build on one’s own data 
• The Analytics Designer feature lets organizations develop their personal analytic applications
• The SAP Analytics Cloud features can be scaled via the ability to develop with APIs

Conclusion:

SAP Analytics Cloud offers a holistic way to convert data into actionable insights. Intending to revamp and transform analytics, the solution eliminates any data silos and helps businesses derive unprecedented accuracy around predictive capabilities, thus facilitating better decision-making.