“After all, it's always the connections with people that give life its value.”
(Wilhelm von Humboldt)

As the year draws to a close, the festive season invites us to pause and reflect on the past few months.

We would like to take this special opportunity to thank you for your loyalty and support.  With festive greetings, we wish you a reflective Advent season, a peaceful Christmas with your loved ones and a successful start to the New Year.

As every year, we look back on the highlights and most-read articles in our annual review and take you on a short journey through the topics that moved you and us in 2024. Be inspired and look forward to lots of exciting content in the coming year!

Popular posts

As in 2023, the focus in 2024 was on SAP Datasphere. With the increasing popularity of SAP Datasphere, the need for guidance on governance topics such as space setup, layer architecture and self-service approaches is also growing. SAP BW users in particular are looking for ways to future-proof their BI landscape and make the most of Datasphere's extended capabilities.

Our article on the Datasphere reference architecture was therefore particularly well received. Based on our experience with numerous Datasphere implementation projects, we have developed a modular reference architecture. This bundles our experience into best practices from which you can choose the building blocks that best suit your requirements.

In addition to SAP Datasphere, another SAP cloud product also enjoyed great popularity in 2024 - SAP Analytics Cloud. Our article Live Connection in SAP Analytics Cloud: Advantages & Challenges was accessed particularly often. In this article, we describe the idiosyncrasies of live connections to SAP BW or SAP BW/4HANA and SAP Datasphere and show you what you need to bear in mind.

The fact that Excel continued to be a popular analysis tool in 2024 alongside the web interface is shown by the many views of our SAP Analysis for Office and SAP Analytics Cloud Add - In comparison. In this blog post, we explain the differences between the tried-and-tested SAP Analysis for Office (AfO) Excel plugin and the newer SAP Analytics Cloud Add-In for Microsoft Excel.

SAP is not the only one constantly working on the further development of SAP Datasphere and SAP Analytics Cloud functions. We are also constantly working to further optimise and improve NextTables, our popular solution for editing tables. The eleventh version of NextTables was released in October. Even though the previous versions already seemed almost perfect, version 11 offers a number of interesting new features and numerous subtle improvements. Highlights include master items, which offer greater clarity thanks to expandable table rows, and an extended adds form that separates the input mask from the table.

In addition, BW Bridge support is also delivered as beta functionality in version 11. This offers a simple input option for tables, ADSOs and InfoObjects and is aimed at customers who use BW Bridge in Datasphere. BW Bridge is of course only a transitional step into the future. We are therefore developing NextTables specifically for upcoming cloud technologies such as SAP Datasphere and Databricks.

Watch the recording of our webinar: SAP Datasphere Insights and the Databricks Lakehouse Approach

Partnerships with Databricks, Dremio and STACKIT 

For us, 2024 was also characterized by new partnerships that support us in offering innovative data and analysis solutions.
Databricks enables data science teams to work together in a standardised environment to create data pipelines, train machine learning models and provide analysis results. These are all important fields for the future, which is why we are continuously expanding our expertise and our network outside of the SAP ecosystem. Open source and cloud BI services have been part of the NextLytics portfolio for many years and this area has continued to grow in 2024: new operational partnerships with Databricks, Dremio and STACKIT have been established and are already delivering concrete added value for our customers.

Databricks is the innovation driver in the open data lakehouse architecture market and combines efficient scalability with state-of-the-art AI integration in all areas. Dremio also relies on a lakehouse platform with a strong focus on data modelling and data governance. In contrast to Databricks, Dremio can also be operated on your own hardware or, for smaller projects, completely  free of license costs as a community edition. The team at German cloud service provider STACKIT also relies on Dremio as the central component of its managed service analytics platform and provides other fully integrated open source data science infrastructures from a trusted source.

Databricks, Dremio and STACKIT as strong partners enable us to offer independent and customised advice on all aspects of modern data and analysis platforms. From hyperscalers to the German private cloud to on-premises operation, everything is possible and nothing stands in the way of a data lakehouse as a scalable foundation for future-proof business intelligence solutions.

Webinar SAP Datasphere and Databricks

The interaction of Databricks and SAP Datasphere was also the topic of our webinar SAP Datasphere Insights & the Databricks Lakehouse Approach. In this webinar, we presented practical insights and best practices from previous SAP Datasphere projects. Another focus was on the expansion of data platforms using the Lakehouse approach, for example with Databricks or MS Fabric. You can request a recording of the webinar here.

Trade fairs and Events

In addition to virtual webinars, we were also present on site at numerous trade fairs and events. For example, we gave a deep-dive presentation ‘Datasphere Migration Retrospective: Challenges and Solutions’ at the BARC conference ‘The Future of SAP Data & Analytics’ and were represented with a stand. We were also present at the Big Data & AI World tech show in Frankfurt. A major highlight was of course the DSAG Annual Congress in Leipzig. In addition to our booth at the trade fair, we also gave a presentation on Datasphere ‘Implementing Datasphere: Challenges & Reference Architecture’. What we were most pleased about, of course, was meeting our customers and readers at these trade fairs and having the opportunity to exchange ideas.

After such successful events, we are already looking forward to meeting you in person again in 2025 - e.g. at the BARC event in Frankfurt or the DSAG Technology Days in Wiesbaden in April. At the BARC event “The Future of SAP Data & Analytics” on February 12, 2025, we will again be represented with a deep dive presentation: “Seamless Planning with SAP Datasphere: The modern replacement for BPC Embedded”. 

Here's to a successful, inspiring and healthy 2025 - we look forward to it!