David Menninger's Analyst Perspectives

I am happy to offer some insights on SAP drawn from our latest Value Index research, which provides an analytic representation of our assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research Value Index: Analytics and Business Intelligence 2019 is the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts by Ventana Research. We utilized a structured research methodology that includes evaluation categories designed to reflect the breadth of the real-world criteria incorporated in a request for proposal (RFP) and vendor selection process for analytics and business intelligence. We evaluated SAP and 14 other vendors in seven categories, five relevant to the product (adaptability, capability, manageability, reliability and usability) and two related to the vendor (TCO/ROI and vendor validation). To arrive at the Value Index rating for a given vendor, we weighted each category to reflect its relative importance in an RFP process, with the weightings based on our experience and data derived from our benchmark research on analytics and business intelligence.

Last year SAP announced it was focusing on SAP Analytics Cloud, a public cloud service, as the primary solution for data discovery and presented a roadmap that combines SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise into a single hybrid solution. Consequently, our analysis is based primarily on SAP Analytics Cloud. Our analysis reveals a broad set of capabilities that supports its move to consolidate around a single product. It uses a model of importing data into the system, but also supports with some limitations live data connections to underlying data via SAP HANA and some other mechanisms.

Overall SAP ranks sixth in the Value Index. Its best rankings were third in Usability and Manageability. The product offers good support for a variety of personas ranging from IT to executives and managers. It provides a modern and clean user interface as well as robust administration and security capabilities.

The product has strong planning, forecasting and predictive analytics as well as some nice collaboration features but needs broader functionality to match the Capability leaders. In particular, better data access and integration and better communication of the outcome of the analytics process would improve its rankings. More performance metrics and configuration options would help improve its Reliability ranking.

This assessment was based on SAP Analytics Cloud version 2018.15.0. The company updates the product biweekly; the current release is 2019.02. In the interim enhancements have been made to the visualizations, data integration and administration (including usage analysis). Users now can also export predictive models for use in other environments.

This research-based index is the most comprehensive assessment of the value of analytics and business intelligence software in the industry. You can learn more about SAP and others using our Value Index as an effective vendor selection and RFI/RFP tool; read the report here.

Regards,
David Menninger
SVP & Research Director