Knoa has announced a new version of its user experience management (UEM) software. The software, which is also sold as SAP UEM, has been updated to include new monitoring and analytics capabilities. The main focus is on customers moving to SAP S/4HANA and who want to be able to monitor a wider set of SAP applications.
The user analytics will also work with other SAP applications. This includes SAP Fiori, SAP Business Client, SAP Enterprise Portal and SAP GUI for Windows. There are also additional analytics capabilities that will work with SAP Leonardo.
Given its relationship with SAP, it should also come as no surprise that Knoa has announced it will continue to align closely with SAP’s plans for S/4HANA.
Bogdan Nica, Vice President of Product and Services, Knoa said: “These new platform extension capabilities represent our commitment to support an increasing number of companies that want to leverage user analytics across their organizations’ entire SAP software landscape and beyond, for a wide variety of use cases.
“We see a growing market trend of user analytics becoming a strategic organizational asset, used by companies as a best practice for all their critical IT and business transformation projects. Knoa is dedicated to support and accelerate this trend by enabling customer-driven innovation based on our unique technology platform.”
Knoa UEM delivers new extensibility for customers
According to the press release there are two key capabilities in Knoa UEM that allow customers to extend the product. These are:
- Extension of the monitoring platform for new application environments, including custom or non-SAP applications, via Knoa’s software development toolkit (SDK)
- Extension of the analytical platform for custom reporting using third-party BI tools, via a REST interface, available for both on-premise and cloud deployments
Knoa claims that these new features enable a number of new innovation accelerators for SAP Leonardo. It lists three in the press release:
- Solution ideation and vision – based on automated insights into the user experience for the “as-is” system
- Rapid prototyping – based on the ability to collect actual user adoption and behavior metrics into the design thinking process
- Business case development – based on an accurate measurement of improvement in user experience and adoption for the new solutions
What does this mean
All of this is interesting for software developers and designers. Knoa gives companies the ability to take advantage of user metrics to know what features are used and what are not. Importantly, as users move across multiple platforms from desktop to mobile device, they want a coherent user experience (UX). Knoa UEM means that how they use the software on different devices can be tracked. This means that the effectiveness of every feature can be assessed.
Development teams working on SAP are under pressure from users to release more often. This has led to the adoption of tools that enable continuous delivery. If developers can more easily see where features are not working, they can quickly adapt for the next release. In the world of enterprise software, this is a capability that internal development teams have struggled with.
One of SAP’s aims is to move all customers to cloud within the next three years. In order to do that a lot of customers will need to rewrite and redesign their enterprise apps. UEM will be a critical tool to rationalise existing solutions, identify redundant features and ensure that the software is fit for purpose.
