IMPORTANT NOTES: The following competitive information is for your informational purposes and is not intended for re-distribution to customers. We provide details to ensure you have current and correct information for how Centigon Solutions is differentiated from competing solutions.
UPDATED JUNE 2015
SAP Dashboards
Centigon Solutions is the market leader for mapping for SAP Dashboards, with over 5 years and 4 versions along with a first to market advantage. With over 250 total sold and 125 active customers today, CMaps Plugin is the standard for which SAP and competitors emulate for providing maps inside of BI Apps.
Approach: CMaps Plugin for SAP Dashboards is a mapping tool with infinate possibilities to create maps experience. CMaps Plugin leans on SAP Dashboards to provide data connectivity, business logic, and data manipulation. Think of CMaps Plugin as another advanced charting componennt.
Webi Intelligence
Webi is hands down the most widely adopted product in the SAP BusinessObjects portfolio, with the most active users (excluding Crystal Reports). There are multiple mapping solutions available for Webi, but only Centigon offers a server-free SAP supported SDK integration using Webi ExtensionPoints. All competing solutions require server-side installs, modifying core assets/ JAR files, or third party server installations (ESRI).
CMaps Plugin for Webi provides out of the box mapping that business users can implement for basic cases, and professional report developers can.
Lumira
Lumira is SAP’s competitive solution to Tableau, Qliksense and a new solution in the marketplace. The product has not reached a level of maturity or market adoption / acceptance like Tableau or Qliksense, but SAP has gone “all in” with Lumira as the future front end for data exploration, data visualization, and storyboards.
Out of the box mapping for Lumira is borderline useless for Location Intelligence, though there are SDK features available to Lumira for importing ESRI that is not readily available to third parties. SAP has a built-in competitive advantage but executed poorly to provide real utility to busness users and typical data exploration scenarios requiring maps. Additionally, the use of ESRI maps requires an additional third party ESRI license.
Third party solutions for Lumira are also not useful because SAP has not released the SDK that allows SDK components to be published to Lumria server (in other words you can build maps but can’t distribute).
As such our current CMaps Analytics for Lumira is delayed until SAP releases the features for sharing. In July 2015 we will host a private beta for customers who want to test and evaluate but not release to market until we can satisfy real production scenarios. This will be powered by CMaps Analytics API V2 which is the same approach that powers Webi. The benefit is customers can build maps templates 1 time and use across multiple products.
CMaps toolkit- Centigon will also release the source code for CMaps for Lumria so customers and partners can further extend and add custom functionality or even create brand new CMaps components for Lumira. This is important for more sophisticated visualizations that fall out of the rehlm of standard maps. The process for creating Lumira extensions is so simple and fast, we will have the ability to create new extensions in minutes!. CMaps toolkit will also be available for Beta in July 2015.
Design Studio
Design Studio is an HTML5 successor to SAP Dashboards. Currently we offer an integration for CMaps Analytics HTML5 viewer from SAP dashboards in Design Studio.
With the release of Design Studio 1.5 SAP included the first maps integration allowing for points and shapes overlays, and a layering mechanism and approach that mirrors CMaps Plugin for Xcelsius. Fundamentally this is the best approach for building a map tool, but does present some significant gaps with modern location intelligence requirements. We believe the current iteration will cover 40-50% of business cases with enough work and scripting.
3rd Party integrations in their current state are fairly redundant to what SAP provides out of the box because they use the same open source services and standards. The incremental value is difficult to notice at a surface level other than having more point and click reconfigurability and ties to ESRI.
For CMaps Analytics we are currently re-developing CMaps for Desgin Studio to take advantage of brand new multi-data source capabilities introduced with 1.5. Like Webi and Lumira Desgin Studio will embrace a CMaps Designer powered template design (design once deploy everywhere) to favor consistency as a top priority.
NOTICE: At Centigon, we are forward in public statements that SAP Design Studio is quite far behind in the marketplace for modern dashboards and visualization apps. As such, Centigon will only support Design Studio through implementation partners and resellers due to the highly technical nature of the solution and the limited market adoption. This will ensure not only initial succes and adoption but also allows us to work through trusted experts.
SAP and ESRI
SAP announced in mid 2013 availability of ESRI tools for use with SAP HANA and at the same time ESRI announced the availability of ESRI Location Analytics for Lumira. Version 1 of this solution shipped in Q2 2014 with very limited functionality and severe gaps in integration, specifically for dashboards, with cited “differences in architecture.”
Location Intelligence without GIS– The biggest differentiation for how ESRI/SAP approach location intelligence is that ESRI is a GIS integration for Business Intelligence. This requires the existence or purchase of an ESRI server, hardware, and specialized GIS skills to install and configure mapping capabilities.
Speed to Market– The second differentiation is time to market from announcements or customer enhancement requests. While the development and release cycles are extremely long for SAP and ESRI to remain in-line, Centigon Solutions is focused solely on SAP for plug and play location intelligence. Centigon regularly updates and enhances existing plugin solutions under an annual subscription.
SAP and OpenSouce
With the release of Design Studio, SAP moved from ESRI to OpenSource to provide basic maps with the release of Design Studio 1.5. As such, SAP has a fragmented maps approach that is inconsistent for customers across products and limited in functionality. While “enhanced geo maps” have been promised, the only scenario where SAP can provide equivalent functionality as CMaps is to build their own cloud maps API / or acquire a provider like MapBox, Nokia, ESRI, etc.
Open source provides tremendous inaccuracies in data quality and also lacks proper geocoding which is almost always a requirement for data or pan/zoom.
3rd Party Providers
Galigeo– Galigeo provides a variety of integration solutions for SAP BusinessObjects.
Xcelsius- This was an aquired solution from APOS and requires ESRI server.
Webi- The Webi integration is powerful with full ESRI support but does require updating standard BusinessObjects JARs and once again ESRI server.
Lumira- The Galigeo Lumira extension looks robust given the limited flexbility with Lumira SDKs. Their approach is out of the box maps that just work which is a good approach which will meet the needs of many customers. However, with SAP also promising the same kind of functioanlity with Lumira, CMaps is designed as a toolkit to meet the more difficult / unique mapping requirements that come up rather than a 1 solution fits all component.
Design Studio- The Desgin Studio component seems to offer the same functionality provided out of the box from SAP with added support for ESRI.