SAP was founded in 1972 as a business applications company. Today, the vendor has a turnover of €31.2 billion, employs more than 105,000 people, and is one of the largest business software vendors in the world.
SAP’s data and analytics portfolio is based on the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP), which provides cloud-based data, analytics, application integration and extension services across all SAP products. It encompasses solutions for BI, analytics, enterprise planning and performance management. From a strategy perspective, SAP is investing heavily in innovation in the cloud while still supporting and developing its on-premises solutions. SAP’s analytics and EPM solutions are spread across different product lines. For planning and budgeting, SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) and the on-premises solution SAP Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC) are the core offerings. Both are supplemented by SAP S/4HANA Finance for Group Reporting for financial consolidation and close. SAP Analytics Cloud plays a central role in the company’s BI and analytics portfolio and combines comprehensive capabilities into one cloud environment. It is built on top of SAP HANA in-memory technology.
SAP Analytics Cloud, SAP’s strategic cloud offering and analytics platform, brings together BI, augmented analytics and enterprise planning into one integrated platform. The product is continuously being improved in areas such as application and dashboard design; conversational analytics and smart data exploration; planning and predictive functionality; and prebuilt business content (e.g., solutions for finance, sales and marketing, HR and various industries). SAP Analytics Cloud is fully web-based with a modern web client and a Microsoft Office 365 Excel add-in. It has a modern and user-friendly UI and offers functionality for all planning activities including strategic, operational, functional and financial planning. SAP Analytics Cloud can be used with its own data sets or to query selected SAP data sources directly. It integrates with all the major SAP enterprise applications (e.g., SAP S/4HANA, SAP BW/4HANA, SAP HANA, SAP Datasphere, SAP Integrated Business Planning). Customers can take advantage of this live connection to implement hybrid cloud scenarios without moving, caching or persisting the data into the cloud. In recent versions, SAP Analytics Cloud’s integration and connectivity with SAP and non-SAP sources has been strengthened. Its planning, predictive and workflow functionality as well as its reporting and dashboarding capabilities have also been improved through a new optimized ‘Unified Story’ experience including scripting options.
SAP BPC is SAP’s recommended product for those requiring an integrated on-premises planning and financial consolidation solution. As an additional front-end option, SAP BPC customers can combine SAP Analytics Cloud with the product’s planning engine. SAP Analytics Cloud can access SAP BPC’s ‘Embedded’ model (data and structures) using a ‘BPC Live Connection’ without replicating data, thus providing write-back options for planning data directly into SAP BPC’s planning model in BW through write-back enabled queries.
SAP S/4HANA Finance for Group Reporting is SAP’s strategic financial consolidation and close offering. It directly integrates with SAP S/4HANA for Central Finance and is available in the cloud, on-premises or in hybrid deployments. SAP S/4HANA Finance for Group Reporting offers capabilities for the preparation of consolidated financial statements and group reporting, including data entry, data validation, currency translation, intercompany reconciliation, postings and more. Thanks to integrations with SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Disclosure Management, the analysis of data, publication of consolidated results and consolidation of plan data is supported.
