At Centigon Solutions, our team has long believed that maps should be a native part of the Business Intelligence toolset. That is why we built GMaps Plugin in 2008 as a bridge to bring Google Maps functionality into SAP dashboards. We have come a long way and the market has also dramatically changed as the demands and needs have grown in sophistication .
LANDSCAPE TODAY
Maps to this day remain an important facet of BI and thankfully with recent releases of SAP BI4.1 we now have geo maps for mobile, dashboards (design studio), and Lumira.
WHERE CENTIGON FITS
While the industry interchanges maps and location intelligence on a regular basis (Centigon included), this article highlights some of the key differences between what SAP is working on for native mapping and where Centigon is innovating ahead to provide one, consistent platform for Location Intelligence.
What is CMaps Analytics?
- CMaps Analytics is 100% cloud-based platform API used for embedded Location Analytics
- CMaps Analytics also includes native extensions, dev toolkits, and partner integrations.
- CMaps Analytics Cloud provides additional auxiliary services for geocoding, drive time visualizations, administrative areas, and other critical Location Intelligence requirements.
- CMaps Analytics can be deployed mobile / browser, cloud / on premise with 1 consistent consumer grade experience.
- CMaps Analytics provides an open and flexible framework with hundreds of configurable properties via point and click
- CMaps Analytics includes Google Maps services including but not limited to map tiles, geocoding, drive time calculations, and others.
- CMaps Analytics includes a JS API with hundreds of additional properties and open frameworks for visualization, analytics, and integration into any HTML5 application.
NEAR TERM ENHANCEMENTS COMING WITH CMAPS ANALYTICS API V2 Q3 2015
- CMaps Analytics is evolving into indoor analytics (IOT)
- Integration of ESRI as native layer type
- Advanced visualization and analytics for supply chain, property management and other industry / business cases where points and shapes are inadequate for communicating Location based analytics.
- Additional cloud data enrichment and analytics services (demographics, etc)
What is SAP Geo Maps
As of July 2015 we estimate the current collective mapping capabilities for SAP data exploration and dashboard solutions meet less than 40% of typical customer mapping requirements.
- A great starting point for customers to use basic maps with Business Intelligence
- Out of the box maps for bubbles (points) and administrative areas
- Features differ from product to product and are highly inconsistent in user experience and feature set
- Still require third party services, subscriptions, tools, and skills to create functional maps
- Geocoding is not included
- Limited ability to customize based on product
- Do not provide APIs for further customization