SAP Design Studio: Raider is now called Twix, nothing else changes

SAP caused quite a stir with the announcement to fuse SAP Design Studio and SAP Lumira. This is my view on things – the usual disclaimer applies 😉 …

The most important thing in advance: nothing changes for our SAP Design Studio customers, everything stays the same. We don’t expect compatibility issues! Only the naming …

But first things first …

Late last year, first voices came to that Lumira and Design Studio are to be merged into a single product. This of course made us take notice. We were close to finish the porting of our graphomate charts and graphomate bulletgraphs from Designstudio to Lumira. More and more of our customers were interested in Lumira and our visualizations.

At the start of May, on schedule with SAPPHIRE NOW in Orlando, the official announcement was released: SAP Lumira and Design Studio Convergence!
As it says in the road map: “One product, two clients!” … a first GA version 2.0 should be available at the end of second quarter of 2017, a first beta/ramp-up is expected by the end of 2016th.

So what does this mean in concrete terms?

Naming
Names have a rather short half life at SAP: ZEN became Design Studio, Visual Intelligence became Lumira. Well, this time, the naming winner is: Lumira!

SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio becomes SAP BusinessObjects Lumira – Designer.
ASAP Lumira becomes SAP BusinessObjects – Discovery.

Whether these names are set in stone – good question, this is the official source:

… but after Steven Lucas left SAP, who knows?

Frontend Strategy
Principally, I like the idea of fusing frontend tools technologically – a first, important step towards the constantly desired interoperability of BI tools. This reduces the “SAP zoo of tools” to now four:

  • SAP BusinessObjects Lumira (including Design Studio capability) for “Data Discovery” and company-wide dashboards,
  • SAP BusinessObjects Analysis for Office for Excel-based(OLAP-)analyse,
  • SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence for self-service reporting and
  • SAP Crystal Reports for highly formatted reporting.

Technology
The most important question, however: what are the technical implications of this fusing? For this, Design Studio and Lumira have to be examined individually.
It is nevertheless clear: from a technological viewpoint, the winner is Design Studio:

Lumira 2.0 run time is really a Design Studio run time.

However, there will probably only be a 64 bit application of the eclipse-based client.

  • SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio
    As already stated: nothing should change for Design Studio users. DS 1.x applications can be opened with SAP BusinessObjects Lumira Designer 2.0 and all SDK extensions will continue to work. Very important for us …
    SAP Design Studio 1.6 will be maintained until the end of 2017.
  • SAP Lumira
    For Lumira users, there will be several changes. After the “Share Room” has vanished at the start of this year – the distribution is now done with the BI platform – now the “Visualize Room” and the “Compose Room” will be fused into a single design area: the Design Studio Canvas. Here, the established Facet Navigation will not be at disposal at first, but will be available in the “Prepare Room”, which will be taken over by Lumira. SAP Lumira Server will not be supported in the future.
    SAP Lumira 1.31 will be maintained until the end of 2017.

Licensing
Regarding the licensing, there will be only minor changes. Lumira Server licenses will be converted to BI platform licenses. Design Studio users have to keep acquiring additional licenses for self-service functions.

What does this mean for graphomate?
We won’t continue to distribute our existing development for Lumira 1.3x SDK (CVOM). It simply doesn’t add up to maintain two different lines of code for the same functionality in a single product. If you want to try our graphomate charts or graphomate bulletgraphs for Lumira 1.31, please email info@graphomate.com for a long-term demo version.
As soon as we are able to have a first look at SAP BusinessObjects Lumira during the beta phase, we will decide if and how we will offer our existing Design Studio extensions for Lumira Discovery … working on WebI continues.

I think this “merge” offers us a lot of possibilities. But as always, the devil is in the details, thus we have to scrutinize the matter very carefully 🙂

But one thing seems clear: Design Studio is now called Lumira!

Have a beautiful late summer

Unterschrift

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