Hello Gabriel,
let me give my view / comments on some of the items that have been raised here.
Let me start with the hierarchy topic - yes we do have charts that can leverage hierarchies and that can drill down / up or expand / collapse hierarchical data within a chart. we already offer that for quite some time.
Overall Design Studio has come a long way already. Is it perfect - no. There are items still missing that I am sure some customers are asking for, such as Variant support mentioned by Thomas (see above) or a common request is also the ability to broadcast a dashboard from Design Studio.
Design Studio is now a little over three years and I have to agree with the comment from Martin K above where he compares Design Studio with Analysis Office. When you look back at Design Studio 1.0 / 1.1 / 1.2 .... I am sure customers would look at it and not even consider to put the product into production. But since release 1.4 / 1.5 / 1.6 - customers are putting the dashboards into product and customers are working on Design Studio projects.
Let me also comment on a few items that were mentioned previously:
- Performance: They key part for performance with Design Studio is first of all the sizing of the system (BI Platform, Mobile Server) but also to make sure the dasboard itself is not making any big "design mistakes" when it comes to the data handling. What I have seen very often is that people made "mistakes" when it comes to the overall data handling.
- Bookmarking: I agree on that one. The "early days" of Bookmarking wasn't great and its still not perfect and it also doesn't help that SAP plans to "reinvent" the bookmarking concept in the next release but already in release 1.6 I would say Bookmarking is for sure in a shape that it can be used in projects right now.
Variant support: Yes that is currently not there and that is something that SAP will have to deliver to really claim Design Studio as a replacement for the Web Application Designer.
Printing: Agreed - the standard printing "isn't that great" but there are partner solutions available that are doing a much better job.
Charts / Visualization: There are standard functionality and there are partner extensions for those areas (will leave it at that).
I think there is an important "underlying" problem that happens very often. Customers see tools like Tableau or Qlik in the market and they start comparing Tableau and Qlik (and other self service BI tools - not excluding others on purpose) with Design Studio and that is a comparison where the chances are pretty high that the customer would be disappointed.
Why would the customer be disappointed ? Because Tableau and Qlik and the other Data Discovery tools are "self service" BI tools and Design Studio requires someone to "build" the environment and "write code". That is something that I have seen very often by customers, that they look at Design Studio and look at a Data Discovery tool and ... are little disappointed.
If a customer looks for data discovery the main tool in SAP's portfolio is SAP Lumira Desktop and it doesn't help that customers are disappointed with the product either.
Can Design Studio deliver a data discovery environment - absolutely. We just created a "Visual BI Explorer" application to provide customers with SAP BusinessObjects Explorer a path forward.
I also think that the current announcement of the roadmap with SAP Lumira and Design Studio and SAP calling it a "merger" but "with two BI clients" is confusing and does not help to put more trust into the product.
Do I think that SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio is a great product ? Absolutely. The fact that I left SAP after 15 years and joined Visual BI to focus on adding extensions to Design Studio should be proof enough for that.
Do I think that SAP will address those gaps between Design Studio and WAD - Yes.
Do I think that Design Studio can be a replacement for Xcelsius / Dashboards - Yes it can and does already deliver far more functionality (except offline)
Do I think that customers will have to look "outside" to close some gaps - Yes and I am not saying that because I am working for a SAP Partner delivering Extensions to Design Studio. I am saying that because the SAP team is building a true Enterprise dashboarding environment and will have to focus on topics like lifecycle management, performance, versioning, ..... and that means sometimes that there is not the time to build every type of visualization that is possible - which is why there is a SDK already early on.
(long answer to a short question....)
So... do I recommend Design Studio to my customers ? yes. (I am betting my job on it)
Have we done some great "stuff" with Design Studio ? Yes we have and we keep doing so.
Will customers have to rely on extensions for Design Studio ? I do think so because SAP will not have the time to build "everything"
Is Design Studio right now "perfect" ? No its not, but I am sure people can find problems or gaps in any of the BI tools and not just SAP's BI tools or Design Studio.
I do believe that with the current release of Design Studio, Analysis Office, and the upcoming version of Lumira Desktop SAP does have a great opportunity to show their strength in the Analytics area and offer a great solution for on-premise and with Cloud for Analytics an alternative for cloud based scenarios.
just look on the positive side: Design Studio integrates with planning, integrates with BW, HANA, S4/HANA, integrates with functionality like Report Report Interface, Currency Translations, Fiori Launchpad, ........
another important proof to me is always how many customers are speaking about the product and their own projects at conferences and I see customers talking about their Design Studio projects at every conference - and its not a negative talk but instead a success story.
If I could have one small "wish" in regards to Design Studio .... that would be that SAP changes the communication on the Lumira 2.0 roadmap slightly and doesn't communicate it as a "merger" with "2 BI clients" - because customers are confused and the "Lumira" brand doesn't help either right now......
So in a nutshell - do I believe in Design Studio and would I recommend it to customers ? 7x24
.... and people that know me for a few years know that I would not say (and for sure not write) this when I would not be willing to stand behind this and not believe in it.
best regards
Ingo