SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today announced key data innovations and partnerships that give customers access to mission-critical data, enabling faster time to insights and better business decision-making. SAP announced the SAP® Datasphere solution, the next generation of its data management portfolio, which gives customers easy access to business-ready data across the data landscape. SAP also introduced strategic partnerships with industry-leading data and AI companies – Collibra NV, Confluent Inc., Databricks Inc. and DataRobot Inc. – to enrich SAP Datasphere and allow organizations to create a unified data architecture that securely combines SAP software data and non-SAP data.
Until today, accessing and using data located in disparate systems and locations – across cloud providers, data vendors and on-premise systems – has been a complex challenge. Customers have had to extract data from original sources and export it to a central location, losing critical business context along the way and recapturing it only through ongoing, dedicated IT projects and manual effort. With today’s announcements, SAP Datasphere helps eliminate this hidden data tax, enabling customers to build a business data fabric architecture that quickly delivers meaningful data with business context and logic intact.
“With SAP customers generating 87% of total global commerce, SAP data is among a company’s most valuable business assets and is contained in the most important functions of an organization, from manufacturing to supply chains, finance, human resources and more,” said Juergen Mueller, Chief Technology Officer and member of the Executive Board of SAP SE. “We want to help our customers take the next step to easily and confidently integrate SAP data with non-SAP data from third-party applications and platforms, unlocking entirely new insights and knowledge to bring digital transformation to another level.”
SAP Datasphere
Available today, SAP Datasphere is the next generation of the SAP Data Warehouse Cloud solution. It enables data professionals to deliver scalable access to mission-critical business data. With a unified experience for data integration, data cataloging, semantic modeling, data warehousing, data federation and data virtualization, SAP Datasphere enables data professionals to help distribute mission-critical business data – with business context and logic preserved – across their organization’s data landscape. SAP Datasphere is built on SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), which includes strong enterprise security capabilities, such as database security, encryption and governance. No additional steps or migrations are required for existing customers of SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, who will benefit from new SAP Datasphere functionality in their product environment. New functionality includes data cataloging that automatically discovers, manages and governs data; simplified data replication to deliver data and its constant updates in real-time; and enhanced data modeling that preserves the rich business context of data in SAP applications. Additional application integration capabilities that link data and metadata from cloud solutions from SAP to SAP Datasphere are planned.
Messer Americas, a leading industrial and medical gas company in North and South America, needed simple and secure access to data from SAP and non-SAP solutions within the company to strengthen data-driven decision-making and free up IT resources to focus on other strategic tasks. With SAP Datasphere, Messer Americas was able to build a modern data architecture that maintained the context of its enterprise data.
“SAP Datasphere simplifies our data landscape, giving us more confidence in the data we’re working with every day so we can better deliver on the needs of the business,” said David Johnston, Chief Information Officer, Messer Americas. “We are able to react faster to emergent changes in supply and demand, resulting in better inventory management, improved customer service and optimization of our supply chain.”
Strategic Partnerships
SAP and its new open-data partners will help hundreds of millions of users across the world make informed business-critical decisions rooted in massive amounts of data. SAP’s strategic partners provide the unique strengths of their ecosystems and enable customers to combine all their data like never before.
“Everybody wants access to SAP data, so leveraging partnerships among tech suppliers is absolutely necessary for a comprehensive data strategy,” said Dan Vesset, group vice president of data and analytics market research, IDC. “Organizations today live in a world where a multi-cloud, multivendor and off- and on-premise data landscape is the norm. SAP is taking a new approach by partnering with a select group of leading partners, treating third-party data as a first-class citizen to better meet the needs of customers.”
Initial partners include:
- Collibra plans to have a tailored integration with SAP, enabling customers to achieve an enterprise governance strategy by building a complete data catalog with lineage across their entire data landscape – both SAP and non-SAP data. Collibra makes trusted data discoverable across any organization.
- Confluent plans to connect its data streaming platform, empowering companies to unlock valuable business data and connect it with external applications in real time. Confluent’s cloud-native offering is the foundational platform for data in motion – permitting the uninhibited flow of real-time data from various sources across an organization.
- Databricks customers can integrate their Data Lakehouse with SAP software so data can be shared with semantics preserved, helping customers simplify their data landscape.
- DataRobot enables customers to leverage multimodal automated machine learning capabilities on top of SAP Datasphere and bring it directly into their business data fabric on whichever cloud platform it resides.
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