Spark Analytics has been recognized by APAC CIOOutlook Magazine as the recipient of “Top SAP Solution Companies,” based on our proprietary methodology, reflecting its position in the industry. This profile has been developed by the APAC CIOOutlook research and editorial team based on insights from an interview with Jeff Stubbs .

Spark Analytics
Innovative Business Intelligence Solutions for SAP

Jeff Stubbs , Director

A well-engineered analytics platform is more crucial than ever for businesses today to be agile and competitive. However, many organizations lack this key technology. Spark Analytics—an SAP partner— provides these organizations with an effective analytics platform capable of saving costs up to 80 percent when compared to traditional business warehouse (BW) implementations. The company is primarily focused on developing business intelligence (BI) as well as analytics solutions for SAP, leveraging Microsoft Azure, Power BI, Simplement, and several other leading technologies.

Although SAP features a plethora of capabilities, what it lacks is a pre-built analytics solution. As a result, businesses are required to develop their own BW data warehouse and analytics solutions—a process that can prove highly expensive and time-consuming. “Organizations with limited or no analytics capabilities often struggle to access SAP data and produce reports, which leads them to look for alternative ways to build analytics platforms externally,” adds Jeff Stubbs, managing director of Spark Analytics. While the company is well-experienced in using Microsoft BI stack to develop efficient analytics and reporting solutions, implementing Simplement’s solution allows them to access SAP data in real time. In fact, Spark Analytics’ suite of tools and solutions is based on the amalgamation of various salient features of SAP, Microsoft, and Simplement technologies. These off-the-shelf solutions allow organizations to gain quick access to their SAP data with the help of user-friendly tools including Power BI, Tableau, Business Objects, and QlikView.

Spark Analytics has been implementing its SAP analytics solutions for five years now, and the effectiveness of these solutions can be illustrated by the company’s recent project for Rio Tinto—one of the world’s largest mining companies. The sheer size of Rio Tinto’s 10 terabyte SAP database made extracting data a difficult task. Spark Analytics, in partnership with Microsoft, implemented a solution that enables Rio Tinto to access all of their SAP data in real time without impacting the performance of production SAP systems. The solution also helped feed SAP data into systems downstream including the corporate data lake and has become a critical component in the SAP infrastructure.

Spark Analytics—an SAP partner— provides Microsoft based analytics platforms for SAP capable of saving costs up to 80 percent when compared to traditional business warehouse implementations

In addition to these BI solutions that have benefitted a large client base, Spark Analytics has recently introduced a suite of prebuilt business content including data models, dashboards, and reports for SAP. These solutions are designed in adherence to the highest levels of security demanded by private as well as government organizations and can be deployed within 60 days. Along with encryption of data both at rest and in transit, Spark Analytics offers Simplement’s unique user security solution that reads SAP user security and replicates it to the systems downstream. This SAP-centered unification of security simplifies the governance of an organization’s entire BI landscape.

Spark Analytics also provides Analytics as a Service to its clients on a monthly subscription, including both on-premise and cloud-based services. Outsourcing of analytics platforms allows organizations to focus their time and resources entirely on data analysis and visualizations for the benefit of business. “While cloud-based platforms ensure low infrastructure costs, short delivery durations, scalability at the push of a button, and seamless access to the latest technologies, they can also respond to customization requests swiftly and effectively,” Jeff Stubbs.

Sparks Analytics continually invests in technologies that can enhance the decision-making of businesses on all fronts. Also, in order to stay up-to-date with evolutions in SAP technology, the company develops its solutions with a roadmap to allow clients a seamless transition if they choose to migrate to HANA in future. “Our roadmap for HANA ensures that money invested in a BI solution now will continue to provide many years of service when our customers implement HANA in the future,” concludes Jeff Stubbs.