SAP Expands Data Warehouse Into Data Fabric with SAP Datasphere

SAP is looking to expand its data warehouse into a data fabric with the launch of SAP Datasphere. Datasphere is the business software provider’s new SaaS-based addition to the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP).

BTP, which already manages and connects SAP and non-SAP applications and data, is the company’s application development, data, analytics, integration and AI platform. SAP HANA Cloud, like BTP, powers SAP Datasphere, which the company describes as a unified platform data integration, data cataloging, semantic modeling, data warehousing, data federation and data virtualization platform.

SAP Datasphere, said SAP chief marketing and solutions officer Julia White, extends SAP Data Warehouse Cloud into a data fabric. By creating a business data fabric, SAP aims to enable the delivery of that data while keeping context and logic intact.

SAP’s Julia White

“With a business data fabric, we can now bring in the complete business context of a customer’s mission-critical processes,” White said during a briefing with media and analysts. “So, both their SAP and non-SAP data is delivered to their data consumers in a way that those data consumers understand it.”

The notion of creating a data fabric is an ambitious undertaking.

DB Insight’s Tony Baer

“SAP is not new to the data integration game, as it has offered a number of tools and cloud services for data virtualization and replication,” wrote DB Insight analyst Tony Baer. “But the notion of going outside the SAP walled garden of data might be new for much of the installed base. SAP’s goal is not simply pairing a data transformation factory with a data warehouse, but instead delivering a service that preserves the context of source data.”

Nevertheless, Baer told Channel Futures: “SAP is just at the beginning of its data fabric journey.”

4 Datasphere Partnerships

SAP Datasphere provides a centralized approach to accessing data. To enable the interchange of SAP and non-SAP data and applications, SAP revealed four integration partners:

• Collibra: The Collibra Data Intelligence Cloud provides data governance, data privacy, data cataloging, and data quality management. In announcing its partnership with SAP, the company said its integration with SAP Datasphere will “help you connect data catalogs in SAP with Collibra accessing both SAP and non-SAP systems, so your organization can establish an enterprise-wide data governance foundation.”
• Confluent: The company that commercialized Apache Kafka, the open-source real-time streaming analytics platform, plans to connect its data streaming platform to SAP Datasphere. “Confluent has been the pioneer of enabling organizations to capture data in motion,” White said.
• Databricks: Before Confluent commercialized Kafka, Databricks did so with Apache Spark, the open-source, multilanguage data analytics engine for large-scale workloads. Databricks is integrating its Data Lakehouse with SAP Datasphere in a way that preserves the semantics of data. “They brought together both data warehousing and data lakes in its Lakehouse architecture,” said John “JG” Chirapurath, SAP’s chief marketing and solutions officer.
• DataRobot: The machine learning capabilities of DataRobot will connect to the SAP Datasphere data fabric.

Maintaining Data Semantics with Business Context

SAP’s CTO, Juergen Mueller, said the first iteration of Datasphere, now available, is the next generation of the SAP Data Warehouse Cloud.

“We are bringing previously isolated products and capabilities into a unified data experience that delivers seamless and scalable access to all business data,” Mueller said. “We have kept all the powerful capabilities of the SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, like symmetrical modeling and data virtualization. And we have added new data cataloging and data ingestion features that are available today.”

Moreover, Mueller underscored the focus on keeping semantically rich data with business context and logic intact.

“With SAP Datasphere, we want to enable businesses and technical users to always have the power of these business semantics and data models established in SAP applications to be easily available for every data project they have,” he said.

Over time, SAP plans to extend it to its offerings, such as Concur and Success Factors.