SAP has quietly purchased Roambi, a suite of mobile BI and data-visualization tools, with plans to bring "mobile access to analytics to everyone." Terms of the deal, which was announced this week, were not disclosed.
Nor did SAP provide many details of its plans for Roambi, which brings the company a mature—it's on version 8—and widely used platform used by more than 800 enterprise customers.
Beyond the core analytics product, members of the Roambi suite include Flow, for creating multi-touch iPad publications that incorporate analytics, video and more. Roambi 8 also introduced Blink, a free iOS data-visualization app that's built on an "insanely fast" in-memory analytics engine.
Roambi has made a number of notable partnerships, including with Box, Okta and Veeva. While known best for its iOS focus, Roambi also supports Android devices.
Analysis: More Data Needed
The notion of getting analytics into the hands of more business users, particularly on mobile devices, isn't a new one. Microsoft made a similar move last year with the purchase of Datazen.
The question now becomes how Roambi fits into SAP's broader analytics strategy. Road map plans are expected to become available soon, and it's likely that SAP will reveal much more at the Sapphire conference in May.
Roambi has positioned itself as primarily a cloud-based platform, but an on-premises version is also available. While SAP seems set to slot Roambi in closely with its recently announced Cloud for Analytics, the on-premises capabilities mean Roambi should have additional relevance for customers of BusinessObjects, with which it has long been integrated.
As always with an acqusition, the devil is in the details.
"This will obviously improve and accelerate SAP delivery of BI and analytics visualization capabilities," says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Doug Henschen. "But for the sake of Roambi customers, I'm anxious to hear the company's plans to continue Roambi's current products and maintain support for third-party BI systems."
"Those using Roambi in combination with other tools have reason to be more anxious until SAP clarifies its long-range plans for Roambi," Henschen adds. "Accessing data from various BI systems is not rocket science, but Roambi did a lot to make its mobile applications work easily with a variety of popular tools."
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