To achieve true digital transformation, organizations must have seamless access to their mission-critical business data no matter where it resides. Yet with data landscapes distributed among different applications and systems both in the cloud and on premises, organizations spend countless resources extracting, rebuilding, and integrating their data.
When organizations fully harness the power of their data, they become enterprises that use it to innovate faster, create new revenue streams, and adapt to unanticipated changes.
At SAP, we know the opportunity to capture and use data strategically has never been more paramount. Today, we’re taking a significant step forward — along with other leaders in our industry — to enable customers to simplify their data landscape and unleash the power of business data.
Announcing SAP Datasphere
We are excited to announce SAP Datasphere, a comprehensive data service built on SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) that enables every data professional to deliver seamless and 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 easily distribute mission-critical business data — with business context and logic preserved — across the data landscape.
SAP Datasphere is the next generation of SAP Data Warehouse Cloud. We have kept all the capabilities that customers love using today and added new capabilities that enhance the discovery, modeling, and distribution of mission-critical business data. Existing SAP Data Warehouse Cloud customers will automatically see the new functionalities in their product environment today and can continue running their workloads without disruption — no migration necessary.
SAP Datasphere offers a range of benefits for businesses to enhance their data strategies.
Access Authoritative Data
SAP Datasphere provides a direct line to mission-critical business data and metadata – and the critical relationship between them – from SAP applications. It makes it effortless for data professionals to solve complex business semantic modeling requirements via the new SAP Datasphere Analytic Model. This capability provides accelerated time-to-value by automatically reusing the semantical definitions and associations from SAP applications, simplifying the steps data professionals must take to deliver mission-critical business data across their organization. We have also made it easier to automatically discover, manage, and govern your data with SAP Datasphere Catalog. Additionally, cataloging data stored in SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Datasphere will be provided at no additional charge.
Enrich All Data Projects
SAP Datasphere enables organizations to combine all their data and implement transformations that help ensure everyone is always working off the same data. It supports both data federation and new fast data replication, offering powerful options to combine data sources and harmonize heterogeneous data into a business semantic model of customers’ diverse data landscapes. Access to industry data is now even easier with SAP Datasphere Marketplace, which has more than 3,000 curated data sets that can be acquired at the touch of a button to quickly enrich data projects with topical, trusted data. Moreover, we are announcing partnerships with industry-leading open data partners to closely integrate their data and artificial intelligence (AI) platforms with SAP Datasphere to enable customers to combine SAP data with other data sources unlike ever before.
Simplify the Data Landscape
SAP Datasphere runs in every cloud and against hybrid environments. This flexibility allows data professionals to have secure access to all their data no matter where it resides. It also enables customers to maximize their on-premise investments, such as SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW). SAP Datasphere, BW bridge, enables the reuse of SAP BW models and connectors, providing a transition path to the public cloud for SAP NetWeaver BW and SAP BW/4HANA customers. Once data is integrated, harmonized, and improved in SAP Datasphere, data professionals can use SAP Datasphere Spaces – a feature to organize, group, and manage data as well as control the level of visibility and collaboration – to create a “virtual workspace.” These virtual workspaces can then be delivered to data consumers that rely on packaged data such as marketing, sales, supply chain, or partner data and AI teams.
SAP Datasphere can make real the promise of business data being an always-on, always high-quality resource that can be relied on – without having to second guess if it is fit for purpose.
Building a Powerful Open Data Ecosystem Around SAP Datasphere
In a major moment for our industry and customers, SAP is partnering with other open data partners —Databricks, Collibra, Confluent, and DataRobot — to radically simplify customers’ data landscapes with a business data fabric. By closely integrating their data and AI platforms with SAP Datasphere, organizations can now access their mission-critical business data across any cloud infrastructure.
Each of these strategic partners bring the unique strengths of their ecosystems:
- Databricks integrates SAP data, with its complete business context, with its Data Lakehouse platform
- Collibra future proofs data governance, privacy, and compliance initiatives
- Confluent sets data in motion with its data streaming platform
- DataRobot empowers organizations to leverage augmented intelligence with automated machine learning
Delivering a Business Data Fabric
SAP Datasphere, and its open data ecosystem, is the technology foundation that enables a business data fabric. This is a data management architecture that focuses on delivering an integrated, semantically rich data layer over underlying data landscapes to provide seamless and scalable access to data without duplication. A business data fabric equips any organization to deliver meaningful data to every data consumer — with business context and logic intact. As organizations need accurate data that is quickly available and described with business-friendly terms, this approach enables data professionals to permeate the clarity that business semantics provide throughout every use case.
“The business data fabric architecture enables us to bring SAP and non-SAP data together in the seamless and self-service way we’ve been envisioning. SAP Datasphere provided us with a solution to build a harmonized layer across SAP and non-SAP, cloud, or on-premise data sources, making the best use of our existing investments in SAP, Microsoft Azure, Salesforce, and Oracle.”
– David Johnston, Chief Information Officer, Messer
SAP Datasphere represents the tailored integration point for all partners enabling customers to connect, unify, and manage SAP and non-SAP data unlike ever before. With the support of some of the world’s most renowned advisory firms, such as Accenture, CapGemini, Deloitte, EY, IBM, and PwC, every organization can enable a business data fabric to deliver meaningful data to their data consumers.
We welcome all partners to join us in the mission of empowering customers to unleash the power of business data.
Get Started Today
Start your journey today to unleash the power of your business data across your data landscape with SAP Datasphere.
- Take a complete tour of SAP Datasphere and the new capabilities with the guided experience
- Try SAP Datasphere instantly with the free tier of SAP BTP
- Register for the SAP Data Unleashed event to hear more about these new SAP and partner innovations
- Read A Deeper Look Into How SAP Datasphere Enables a Business Data Fabric, by Juergen Muller, CTO and member of the Executive Board of SAP SE
JG Chirapurath is chief marketing and solutions officer for SAP BTP.
This piece was originally published on the global SAP News Center.