Installing and Extending Intelligent Applications

By providing Intelligent Applications, SAP has greatly reduced your time-to-value for data analysis. Many steps that would have required in-depth, prolonged thought, along with the setup of many system tasks, have already been taken care of by SAP. You just need to install the Intelligent Applications with a few clicks to enable the business user.

From a business user perspective, the result of an installed Intelligent Application is a ready-to-use dashboard. The Intelligent Application is presented to the business user as an SAP Analytics Cloud story which is connected to one or more underlying SAP Datasphere models. The story and all of these connected models are automatically created during the installation of an Intelligent Application. Even the roles are generated. You just have to assign the roles to the designated business users.

An Intelligent Application consists of a visualization object and its underlying models. It contains diagrams and may contain tables and other elements to display its data. The data for these elements is sourced from data products that are combined using SAP Datasphere models. You will now take a closer look at the high-level object for visualization.

In a simple case, the Intelligent Application provides data from a single data product. In such a simple case, the data is presented in form of an SAP Analytics Cloud story as a no-code dashboard based on an underlying Analytic Model and view. But in more typical cases Intelligent Applications are based on several models and multiple data products. They may even contain some coding. It is planned to further enhance the variety of available Intelligent Applications, including more application areas and more features such as AI, to provide full-fledged, SAP-managed software-as-a-service Intelligent Applications. SAP partners are already developing Intelligent Applications including many that cover industry scenarios.

An Intelligent Application such as Working Capital Insights requires SAP Analytics Cloud. More advanced Intelligent Applications using other SAP Business technology platform services, or with extra requirements are planned and may not always require SAP Analytics Cloud.

Intelligent Applications cannot be consumed by third-party tools.

Installing an Intelligent Application requires very few clicks.

Log on to the SAP Business Data Cloud cockpit and search through the available Intelligent Applications. Each Intelligent Application provides a section called Documentation, where you can check if it serves your needs. You can also see which data products are associated with this Intelligent Application.

Installation creates SAP-managed objects. The following takes place when you successfully install an Intelligent Application:

1. The status of the Intelligent Application changes from available to installed.
2. Associated data products are installed and data access is established. This includes automated data replication from the source business application. It may include data transformation services to clean-up and improve the potentially meaningless raw data into something useable at the basic level. This step requires the backend service of SAP Business Data Cloud called Foundation Services.
3. SAP-managed Intelligent Application spaces are created in SAP Datasphere to manage the Intelligent Application content. There are typically three spaces created in a stack from bottom to top, as follows: Ingestion space (inbound space for foundation models) > Shared artifacts space (enriched models shared across Intelligent Applications) > Intelligent Application space (analytical models for consumption by one Intelligent Application).
4. SAP Datasphere artifacts, such as replication flows, tables, views, and analytic models, are created in these three spaces to ingest, prepare, and expose the required data to SAP Analytics Cloud.
5. Scoped roles are generated for the Intelligent Application space.
6. A dashboard is generated to visualize the data. This is deployed as an SAP Analytics Cloud story.

The Intelligent Application is based on a live connection to SAP Datasphere. All navigation options that SAP Analytics Cloud could support for this connection type are available to be used when building an Intelligent Application, such as defining filters, selecting members or dimensions, or setting a variable value. A typical use case for such a variable is to set the target currency for currency translation.

Let's practice the installation of an Intelligent Application.

Now that we have installed the Intelligent Application, let's launch it and begin to explore the contents.

Suppose you have discovered and installed an Intelligent Application that does not quite fit your needs. You would like to enhance the dashboard. However, the SAP-managed Intelligent Application is protected against any changes, so directly adjusting the Intelligent Application is not supported. It is not possible to copy an entire Intelligent Application and all of its dependent objects, but it is possible to copy most of its components.

The easiest way to enable enhancements is to copy the SAP Analytics Cloud story of your Intelligent Application. Then, you enhance or adjust the copy. Note that if you reinstall the Intelligent Application after SAP provides an update, the new story will not be affected by changes on the original story. However, the copy will be based on the same Analytic Model. This means that changes of the Analytic Model will affect both stories.

In other use cases, you might need some complex data logic, or you want to add a data access control to enable authorization checks on row-level of your data. In these cases, you copy and change the underlying models in SAP Datasphere.

Watch the following video to see different use cases and the corresponding steps for creating stories that suit your needs.

Access a live SAP Business Data Cloud landscape and work through some key tasks guided by provided scripts:

SAP Business Data Cloud trial