Hi everyone.
If, like me, you followed attentively what happened at SAPPHIRE (or better, attended it), you might have noticed that, finally, SAP officially unveiled their strategy regarding the fusion between Lumira and Design Studio.
Blair has talked about that recently.
And even if there have been some official talks about this fusion before SAPPHIRE, it remained unclear in most of the minds (in mine anyway).
Well, the will to create one product from Lumira and Design Studio can be understandable.
From my point of view, Lumira and Design Studio allow their respective target users to (mostly) achieve what they want, but both suffer from things that prevent them to clearly shine above the market.
Lumira, on one hand, offers great self-service experiences, but suffers from what I would call "cap effect", by not going deep enough when coming to restitution, to story-telling. Once you have stunning visualizations, you are left with not that much possibilities to clearly present your story, even if I recognize that what is in place leverage the self-service spirit.
Design Studio, in the other hand, allow the users to create poweful business apps, but suffers from a "too-high entry price", as seen by the prospects/customers (in reality, it's not that hard 
). The simple fact to tell that it requires some javascripting tends to "cool" interested people.
The fusion between Design Studio and Lumira therefore appears as a move that will try to fill the gap that exists between business apps and self-service. And in this way, the philosophy behind it is really good.
But still, there are some questions that remain unanswered.
Amongst them, is the question of custom (a.k.a partner) extensions.
As some of you might already know, Design Studio and Lumira are really different products technically speaking, and so are their SDK.
Lots of partners have developped extensions to fill exisiting needs in these two products, and to be clear, they have developped one extension for Lumira and another one for Design Studio, because let's be honest, interoperability does not really exist between them (at least for the moment).
I won't lie, I was kinda sad that this topic was not really tackled at SAPPHIRE, because I think it matters a lot, as it will impact lots of partners AND customers.
How will the fusion impact the partner extensions?
I'm not sure yet, and that's what worry me.
To illustrate what I'm talking about, I will give an concrete example that will happen in the future, more precisely what will happen to us.
Here, at Galigeo, we have developped two custom geomapping extensions, respectively for Lumira and Design Studio. One works on Lumira Desktop and Lumira Server, and the other on Design Studio Desktop and Design Studio Server.
Tomorrow, if I follow the merge introduced by SAP, we will still have an extension on Lumira and one for Design Studio (equals to two different extensions, like today), but what on the server side? One extension will take the lead above the other? Let's say it's the Design Studio one, how will a story using a Galigeo extension (developped for Lumira), coming from Lumira work once uploaded to the server side?
The only thing it found about custom extension is right here, and indicates that retrocompatibility will be ensured in 2.x, but still, what's next for the future of SDK(s)?
Today, this is what we have
But tomorrow, how will it be?
Of course, the best would be
But I'm sure it would be really hard to also merge SDK, and clearly not what SAP has planned.
I'm also sure lots of our customers/prospects will ask us such questions in the incoming days, and they need to be reassured on what's going on.
Unfortunately, many questions remain in the fog for the moment.
I really hope SAP will also unveils a "developer-strategy" for that part really soon.
Br,
Vincent