Last week, SAP took what it called a ​“Data Moment,” and a bit more, to intro­duce SAP Data­s­phere, a data man­age­ment solu­tion that promis­es to sim­pli­fy and speed data inte­gra­tion, access, and gov­er­nance across Cloud, hybrid, and on-premis­es SAP and non-SAP sys­tems and environments.

Dur­ing an ASUG news brief­ing, gen­er­al press brief­ing, and high-pro­file webi­nar announce­ments last week — the lat­ter shared live at ASUG Best Prac­tices: SAP S/4HANA and Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Plat­form (BTP) Con­fer­ence — SAP lead­ers var­i­ous­ly char­ac­ter­ized SAP Data­s­phere as one of the company’s ​“biggest launch­es,” the next gen­er­a­tion of SAP Data Ware­house Cloud, and a ​“com­plete rethink” of its data man­age­ment approach, espe­cial­ly giv­en SAP part­ner involve­ment from the outset.

Hid­den Data Tax

Juer­gen Mueller, SAP Chief Tech­nol­o­gy Offi­cer, said Datasphere’s seman­tics engine ​“pro­vides the con­text to have any data, from any source, make sense.” 

Julia White, SAP Chief Mar­ket­ing and Solu­tions Offi­cer, said Data­s­phere aims to reduce or elim­i­nate the ​“hid­den data tax” of time and expense involved when orga­ni­za­tions need to extract, rebuild, inte­grate, har­ness, and man­age data, dur­ing and after a project. 

Mueller fur­ther not­ed that the solution’s scal­able ​“busi­ness data fab­ric” tack­les cus­tomer needs that include:

• Self-ser­vice access to trust­ed busi­ness data, deliv­er­ing data that is con­sum­able for busi­ness users.
• Data gov­er­nance, pri­va­cy, and com­pli­ance, which is built into the archi­tec­ture itself, not as anoth­er lay­er of extra complexity.
• Real-time data to facil­i­tate oper­a­tional apps in action with insights and ana­lyt­ics across hybrid and multicloud.
• “And maybe the most impor­tant top­ic com­ing up all the time is that all orga­ni­za­tions, our cus­tomers, want to sim­pli­fy their ever-grow­ing, ever more com­plex data land­scape to reduce cost, tech­ni­cal depth, and also, risk, for exam­ple, asso­ci­at­ed to data privacy.”

Indeed, SAP Datasphere’s debut and lead­er­ship posi­tion­ing aims to tack­le ASUG mem­ber chal­lenges report­ed in the 2023 Pulse of the SAP Cus­tomer research. Among those data points:

• Near­ly half (45%) of the research par­tic­i­pants said inte­gra­tion between SAP and non-SAP sys­tems is a top focus area for 2023.
• Inte­gra­tion is gen­er­al­ly a top chal­lenge for 32% of orga­ni­za­tions in the study.
• Mas­ter data main­te­nance and gov­er­nance also is a top chal­lenge, as 32% of orga­ni­za­tions cit­ed this issue.

For more ASUG Pulse data and insights, vis­it https://​asug​.postclick​mar​ket​ing​.com/​P​u​l​s​e​-​S​A​P​-​C​u​s​t​o​m​e​r​-2023.

Do It Right

In ear­ly reac­tions to the SAP news, Joshua Green­baum, prin­ci­pal at Enter­prise Appli­ca­tion Con­sult­ing and vet­er­an SAP ana­lyst, point­ed out, ​“Curat­ing and access­ing strate­gic enter­prise data has always been one of the most impor­tant and most poten­tial­ly fraught com­po­nents of any busi­ness transformation.”

“Do it right, and you’ve unlocked impor­tant val­ue for your com­pa­ny and its strate­gic process­es,” Green­baum con­tin­ued. ​“Do it wrong, and you’ve just opened Pandora’s box. Enabling cus­tomers to do this accu­rate­ly and safe­ly, while main­tain­ing the busi­ness con­text of their data, espe­cial­ly across het­ero­ge­neous data sources, is a big win.” 

Built on SAP BTP

SAP Data­s­phere is gen­er­al­ly avail­able; exist­ing SAP Data Ware­house cus­tomers will be upgrad­ed to this ​“first iter­a­tion” of SAP Data­s­phere, SAP said. Built on SAP BTP, SAP Data­s­phere adds data dis­cov­ery, data cat­a­loging for detailed data lin­eage, sim­pli­fied data inte­gra­tion fea­tures with change-data-cap­ture, a mul­ti­di­men­sion­al mod­el­ing expe­ri­ence, data dis­tri­b­u­tion capa­bil­i­ties, ana­lyt­ics, and con­sis­tent user inter­face, accord­ing to SAP.

JG Chi­ra­pu­rath, Chief Mar­ket­ing and Solu­tions Offi­cer, SAP BTP, said SAP Data­s­phere will help ​“data pro­fes­sion­als: data engi­neers, data sci­en­tists, data­base ana­lysts, any­one who’s in the process of extract­ing, trans­form­ing, load­ing, man­ag­ing seman­tic rela­tion­ships” and is ​“chal­lenged with how to effec­tive­ly share it” for busi­ness trans­for­ma­tion and busi­ness process and appli­ca­tion integration.

In addi­tion to SAP Datasphere’s inher­ent capa­bil­i­ties devel­oped over the last year, Chi­ra­pu­rath empha­sized the impor­tance of the ​“open data ecosys­tem” of part­ners, and the ini­tial four includ­ed in the news. SAP Data­s­phere is inte­grat­ed with:

• Data­bricks ana­lyt­ics solu­tion and Data Lake­house data warehouse
• Con­flu­ent real-time ana­lyt­ics and deci­sion-mak­ing tools
• Col­li­bra SAP and non-SAP meta­da­ta man­age­ment and gov­er­nance solutions
• DataRo­bot mul­ti­modal machine learn­ing capabilities

Addi­tion­al part­ners and func­tion­al­i­ty are expect­ed in the future.

SAP Part­ner Importance

Both David Was­com, ASUG SVP of Exec­u­tive Pro­grams, and Green­baum not­ed the strate­gic impor­tance of build­ing the part­ner ecosystem.

“SAP is build­ing an approach and part­ners that should pro­vide SAP cus­tomers with a much more holis­tic data man­age­ment solu­tion that lets them access and man­age data effec­tive­ly and con­sis­tent­ly from SAP and non-SAP sys­tems,” Was­com said. 

Yet, Was­com added, there still may be chal­lenges. ​“The biggest ques­tions I have is how do cus­tomers man­age all of the pieces/​parts that the part­ner solu­tions bring into the mix?” he added.

Accord­ing to Green­baum, ​“The part­ner­ships are an indi­ca­tion that SAP under­stands the impor­tance of hav­ing a vibrant ecosys­tem of part­ners, espe­cial­ly small­er, bou­tique part­ners that have the spe­cial­ized tal­ent and cus­tomer focus that is often lack­ing in the larg­er firms.”

Chi­ra­pu­rath said sev­er­al cur­rent SAP cus­tomers are in tri­als with SAP Data­s­phere. In press dis­cus­sions, SAP includ­ed David John­ston, CIO at Mess­er Amer­i­c­as, an indus­tri­al gasses sup­pli­er well under­way with SAP Datasphere. 

John­ston said SAP Data­s­phere sup­ports a long­time cor­po­rate mantra to ​“always go straight to the source for the data,” har­mo­niz­ing the organization’s data from SAP and non-SAP sys­tems with trust­ed data and con­sis­tent context.

“We can make smarter deci­sions, must quick­er,” John­ston not­ed. ​“We’ve seen self-ser­vice data access growth,” with ​“IT now more of a steer­ing and data gov­er­nance” resource for the business.