๐ SAP rounds out data warehouse cloud functionality, renamed Datasphere
๐ก Newskategorie: IT Security Nachrichten
๐ Quelle: cio.com
SAPโs Data Warehouse Cloud is evolving, gaining new features and a new name, Datasphere, as the company addresses continued diversification of the enterprise data.
Itโs part of SAPโs move to become a more significant player in the business data fabric space, said Irfan Khan, SAPโs chief product officer for its HANA database and analytics.
Khan said SAP is going beyond the usual capabilities of a data fabric by preserving the business context of the data it carries. โWe want to preserve the business semantics and the business context of that data,โ he said. โWeโre not going to have customers make a compromise between accessing the data virtually or federating the data.โ
Threat recognition
The competitive threat SAP faces in this space, said IDC analyst Dan Vesset, is that the data landscape is becoming more diverse.
โYou have SAP applications and you have more and more of somebody elseโs applications in the same environment, and the question then is, whereโs the center of gravity? Who has the most pull?โ he said.
Khan acknowledged the threat is influencing SAPโs product development.
โA significant part of SAPโs evolution towards this new strategy is recognizing that no single vendor will own the entire customer stack,โ he said. โThat customer stack is in fact very heterogeneous.โ
In the past, SAP and other vendors have assumed that if they create a new product, customers will move their data to it โ but that has not always worked out well for either vendors or customers.
SAP is no longer taking a hard line on moving data to its applications, Khan said.
โIf youโre running a marketing campaign, more likely youโll need to have access to SAP data,โ he said. โBut it just makes it a lot easier to have access to the SAP context through the business data fabric, through Datasphere, without having to redundantly move the data, lose the context, lose semantics, and then have to go to the painful exercise of having to reconstitute all that again.โ
The new functions Datasphere offers over Data Warehouse Cloud include automated data cataloging, simplified data replication, and improved data modeling.
The move from Data Warehouse Cloud to Datasphere will be easy, according to Khan: Existing customers will automatically have access to the new functionality and will be charged for usage under their regular SAP consumption agreement. โThereโs nothing more to pay if you donโt use it,โ he said.
SAP is also opening it up to partners to add new functionality and make it easier to access data from other platforms through Datasphere.
โWe want to make it very easy for SAPโs data to be accessed and to be extended with business context through Datasphere,โ he said. โBut weโll also use our new data ecosystem participants.โ
Partner agreements
Four partners are signed up to offer Datasphere integrations at launch. Collibra plans to offer enterprises a way to build a complete catalog, with lineage, of all their SAP and non-SAP data. Confluent will connect its cloud-native data streaming platform to Datasphere, making it possible to connect SAP and external applications in real time. Plus, Databricks is making it possible for users of its data lakehouse to integrate it with SAP applications, preserving semantics when data are shared. And DataRobot is helping customers to build automated machine learning capabilities on Datasphere.
SAP has chosen its initial partners to cover a broad range of functions with little overlap between them, noted Vesset. But that doesnโt mean thereโs no overlap with Datasphere itself.
Take Datasphereโs new data cataloging and governance functions, for instance. โTheoretically, one could just use Collibra,โ Vesset said.
However, he said, SAP will have greater knowledge of the metadata associated with the data held in its applications that the catalog is supposed to capture, and it can invest more in integration with its partners. โIf youโre an SAP ERP customer, or if you have multiple SAP enterprise applications, probably the easier path would be to use SAPโs product first, and then use something like Collibra for other data thatโs not SAP,โ he said.
Four partners are a start, but to make a success of this new strategy to help customers integrate SAP and non-SAP applications into their data fabric, โThey absolutely need more, because they need to get to where their clients are, and their clients will have many different tools,โ he said. SAP is offering nothing enterprises canโt find elsewhere โ at a price. โYou can build any of these tools yourself from open-source technologies, but thereโs a cost associated with that. Thatโs the build, buy, or partner decision that every large organization needs to make,โ Vesset said. โSAP is hoping that their solution will provide enough efficiency and cost savings for clients to come to them.โ