SAC VS. OTHER ANALYTICS SOLUTIONS: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF FEATURES AND BENEFITS

Abstract

The need to solve real-world problems by leveraging data has owned increased pressure on organizations to adopt data-driven decision-making structures due to this high demand; solid, scalable, and smart analytics platforms have been in high demand. SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions embedded the SAP digital ecosystem, and has become a strategic solution of the company. In this paper, we will provide a comparative stance as well as analysis between SAC and other business intelligence (BI) and analytics solutions available in the market today that regards what each solution has to offer and how they relate to enterprise use. Its areas of investigation include the fundamental functionalities that involve data connectivity, modeling, visualizing, predictive analytics, and integration capability. The study employs the qualitative comparative approach and the secondary data in the research derives out of the literature available on academic websites, vendor-documentation, case studies, and user reviews. Using this perspective the study compares SAC with Microsoft Power BI, Tableau and Qlik Sense on grounds of comparative performance, user experience, affordability and in line with enterprise IT solution plans. The results indicate that it is the inbuilt nature of SAC with SAP environment, ability to access real-time data by live connectivity and the single interface that uses planning, analytics and forecasting. Nonetheless, other tools feature better in, among others, advanced customization, integration of third-party data sources, and flexibility of the user interface as compared to that of SAC. Such comparative understanding can assist decision-makers in picking the platforms that best fit in their organizational targets, their technical environment and data strategy. The final part of the paper contains strategic suggestions that any enterprise thinking of adopting SAC should consider and future trends of the analytics platform that promises to transform the future of business analytics as a result of the emergence of artificial intelligence as well as cloud-native deployments and embedded analytics within the business processes.