The software manufacturer has developed a new data management system.
(Photo: imago/R. Wittek)
Dusseldorf Oil, gold or another commodity? There are many more or less apt comparisons of the role data plays in the modern economy. What consultants have been writing on their slides for years is now becoming reality in companies. Many companies invest heavily in the collection and analysis of information and hire Chief Digital Officers.
In this competitive market, SAP wants to distinguish itself with a new generation of data management. On Wednesday, the software manufacturer announced a system called Datasphere that is intended to make it easier for business customers to process and analyze business-critical information. In other words, the group wants to sell more shovels to the gold diggers.
So far, the use of data in the corporate world has been complex because it is stored in a large number of systems, said SAP technical director Jürgen Müller. “It is a challenge for our customers to get a holistic and integrated overview of their business processes in real time,” said the CEO.
SAP believes it can remedy the situation. Datasphere – a further development of the product Data Warehouse Cloud – is a new “layer for business data”, explained Müller. The cloud system is intended to facilitate tasks such as merging, cataloging and storing data from different sources. Software from other manufacturers such as Microsoft or Salesforce can also be connected.
A central promise: The group wants to maintain the business context via uniform semantics, i.e. a kind of universal language for the data. So far, the adaptation in projects eats up 80 percent of the time, stressed SAP Marketing Manager Julia White. The resulting costs are a “hidden data tax”. In a survey by market researcher IDC, 52 percent of IT managers named integration as the biggest problem.
The head of marketing at SAP has declared war on the “hidden data tax”.
(Photo: SAP)
SAP cited the sale of a car as an example of its use. A single transaction affects numerous IT systems, from demand planning to financing to production. Datasphere should enable the data to be transferred to all systems without complex integration.
However, SAP itself contributes to the current complexity. Working with the systems of the German software manufacturer is considered demanding among specialists for data analysis – it pursues a specific business logic that differs from other providers. If you want to combine data from SAP systems and other sources, you have to do a lot of translation work.
>> Read here: SAP will probably get an “extremely demanding chief supervisor”
A whole range of software providers and consulting firms are active in the market for data management. SAP is now likely to try to retain some of its customers, especially those who already use several of the software manufacturer’s products. The Dax group works with large IT service providers such as Accenture, Deloitte and IBM for sales and implementation. When it comes to technology, he relies on partnerships with specialist providers such as Confluent and Databricks.
With the announcement, Datasphere is available as an update to the previous version Data Warehouse Cloud. However, the connection of different data sources might take some time. The company promised that more and more SAP programs would be connected over time.
In addition to the exact timetable, there are likely to be other unanswered questions for customers. For example, how well the integration of data from systems from other manufacturers, which is considered complex, succeeds – that is the prerequisite for data to be able to serve as a valuable raw material.
More: SAP could raise $12.4 billion with Qualtrics.