My Last Tweet: San Diego
At the tail end of last week there was a bit of dooms-day chatter on Twitter around Xcelsius, and this week I saw two posts from Steve Lucas on Flash Demise and Mobile-First. This activity sparked a lot of buzz and debate on the web. So how could I resist chiming in?
In the next few years, customers will have more choices than ever for how they will approach dashboards and visualization, but they will have to prioritize based on needs and budget. Once again, it will come down to choosing the right tools for the job..
1. Xcelsius with some kind of HTML5 ported option yet to be announced, which we have to assume will be a subset of Xcelsius functionality.
2. SAP mobile enabled solutions like Explorer / Exploration views and BI Mobile (webi mobilized)
3. Xcelsius coupled with a third party offering like Antivia XWIS Anywhere and Exxova MyBI Mobile,
4. Third party mobile visualization products like Roambi.
This list will be prioritized based on the following questions that every customer will need to ask themselves for an entire BI initiative and for specific projects:
- Is the end users primarily a mobile user or desktop user?
- How important is mobility for the dashboard? Must have, should have, nice to have?
- Will the technology(s) in question provide the results required by the end users?
I will likely do a full write-up to compare and contrast these approaches once BI4 release pack 3 hits the market this quarter.
So what about Xcelsius?
The reality is that Xcelsius, like any other technology, will have to evolve or be replaced. The “Xcelsius” as we know it, which is a Flash and Excel powered technology wrapped up in an desktop development environment, has a shelf life. SAP is NOT killing off a product, because it is hardly a move that we would expect for a highly successful and profitable technology. The SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards prooduct has a large customer base, thriving community, and a great ecosystem of partners who are continuously innovating platform. What ever the fate of Xcelsius is, SAP’s “Mobile First” is a clear strategy shift that will not happen over night.
Is the future clear or cloudy?
While SAP has sat on Xcelsius, the company’s focus has shifted towards growth opportunities like Big Data, Cloud, Social, and Mobility…it is baked into our brains as SAP customers and partners. There is a common thread here that is critical to the success to all of these initiatives: “End user experiences.”. Most of these strategic growth areas for SAP, have integration back to the core Business Analytics product lines. So the question we all have is what exactly will SAP’s next-generation “mobile first” dashboard solution look like? Will SAP truly innovate in this area? Or will the huge ecosystem of software vendors beat them to the punch?
Let me know what you guys think.
I still like to imagine that a completely new development tool is currently being created somewhere in Eastern Europe with Apple-like (or should it be James Bond-like) secrecy. Such a tool would have no dependencies on either Microsoft Excel or Adobe Flash and would deliver business intelligence content to both web and mobile devices (possibly even through mobile browsers rather than apps).
I have to base my opinions/suggestions based on history, and what technology I have access to. If what you describe is true, that would be awesome. I have my own opinions but I will have to keep those out of the public domain
Hi Ryan,
If you look at the main news around the Xcelsius product of the last months including TechEd it’s mainly about technical tweaks to better support BW functionality like hierarchies etc. The announced Feature Pack 3 is a nice example of this. It’s full of technical bells and whistles while the only user experience improvement seems to be the waterfall chart type. That’s not what we are waiting for.
The focus for Xcelsius innovation and product development should be much more on the UX and flexible development axis, rather than the technical support axis. Simple features which come out of the box with SAP BO explorer / exploration views like drag and drop, switch between visualizations and easy default filter options without configuration are the stuff we are looking for!
I’m looking forward to future announcements on the subject and am excited to see which direction this will go.
Cheers!
Ryan,
An interesting and thought-provoking article for all of the Xcelsius community out there and I like your analysis of the various options which abound following Steve Lucas’ recent posts.
As, like you, someone who has spent more time than I care to count working with Xcelsius, I’m keen to keep that reservoir of knowledge and ‘tips and tricks’ which I and my team have built up over years rather than have to start all over again relearning how to do something we can do almost subliminally!
Whilst I might attract accusations of being a ‘Luddite’, I have seen the result over many years in the BI market of customers who have struggled with the vendor’s desire to have them change direction every few years – hence my regard for any solution whcih requires the absolute minimum of change in the models we’ve developed and which clients are used to working with.
Wide scale adoption of the Xcelsius marketplace by a series of innovative third-party developers (yourself included) have created a community which allows for much greater capability than a sole developer such as SAP (despite their size) or RoamBi (despite their history) can provide, so once again anything which allows us to use the results of all of this entrepreneurial effort would get my vote.
The increasing momentum of the drive to mobility does create a number of challenges for both developers and end users to surmount and I look forward to your further comments.
I want to get some http://raspberryketonepure.webstarts.
com/ – does anyone know the best site for raspberry ketones?
This blog was… how do I say it? Relevant!! Finally I have found something that helped me.
Many thanks! read on…
I was able to find good advice from your blog articles. web site
The next time I read a blog, Hopefully it won’t disappoint me just as much as this one. I mean, I know it was my choice to read, nonetheless I genuinely thought you’d have something interesting to say. All I hear is a bunch of whining about something you could fix if you weren’t too busy searching for attention. nono reviews