SAP Analytics Cloud

SAP Analytics Cloud combines advanced analytics with planning capabilities on a unified data foundation, sitting within SAP Business Data Cloud and using Joule, SAP's AI assistant, to automate reporting, surface insights and develop business plans.

Holding analytics and planning in one product is the distinguishing property and it addresses a division most organisations live with badly. Business intelligence reports what happened while planning decides what should happen next, and they normally run in separate tools, so the actuals a plan is built from are a copy extracted at some point and the variance analysis compares two systems' versions of the same number.

Being native to SAP's business data is the other half and for an SAP customer it is frequently decisive. The mission-critical numbers live in SAP applications, and every third-party analytics tool must extract, model and reconcile them, which is where a large share of any analytics project's budget disappears and where disagreements about which figure is correct originate.

Joule as the AI layer covers automated reporting, insight discovery and plan development, and the significance is that it is grounded in the semantic definitions SAP applications already carry rather than inferring meaning from column names. An AI that knows what the business means by revenue because the system defines it is in a different position from one guessing. A demo and a trial are offered. Rates are not published.