Wednesday, September 1, 2021

APOS Live Data Gateway Use Case – Connecting SAP Analytics Cloud to Denodo

A global leader in human and animal nutrition innovation and distribution with hundreds of facilities and tens of thousands of employees implemented SAP Analytics Cloud as part of their ongoing digital transformation, but needed additional connectivity to meet their analytics objectives.

We received nearly simultaneous requests from the SAP Max Attention support team and system integrator Capgemini for input on one of this customer’s connectivity issues. Specifically, they were considering the Denodo data virtualization platform as a means of assembling data from multiple data sources as part of a centralized dashboarding project, and they needed live, integrated data connectivity from Denodo to SAP Analytics Cloud.

APOS and Denodo consulted separately and collaborated with the customer and their consultants to ensure a successful Denodo implementation using APOS Live Data Gateway for connectivity to live and cached data.

Requirements: Structuring the Data Environment Using Data Virtualization

• Virtualized Connectivity to Non-SAP Data Sources & Platforms
  They needed secure, live, transparent connectivity to virtualized data assets from a Microsoft Azure data lake, SAP S/4HANA, and other data warehouses/marts and legacy data assets.
• Self-Service Modelling & Analytics
  They needed to enable a large number of users to perform self-service modelling and analytics to ease the burden on IT resources.
• SSO Integration
  They needed Single Sign-On capabilities to exercise governance over enterprise data workflows.
• Ease of deployment
  They needed a solution they could implement quickly and safely to provide secure access to data assets and quick time to value. Smooth portability of modelling assets through deployment environments was also important.

Solution: APOS Live Data Gateway Live Mode

The company selected APOS Live Data Gateway to implement live data connectivity to Denodo, drawing on data assets from their Microsoft Azure data lake, and other non-SAP data assets, and SAP HANA, yielding high-performance data and data connectivity virtualization with SAP Analytics Cloud. Analysts and business users build APOS views in the Live Data Gateway Web interface against virtual data and use those views to build SAP Analytics Cloud stories, fulfilling the needs for self-service modelling and analytics.

Feedback

“This customer’s SAP Analytics Cloud deployment is part of a massive global transformation project, and they needed to populate a large number of dashboards with live KPIs from numerous data sources with heavy use of time dimensions, time series charts and variance charts, while allowing live drill-down to underlying data. They were extremely pleased with the high-performance data virtualization provided by the combination of Denodo and the Gateway. Their IT department is running analytics in multiple environments for development, testing and security purposes, and are quite happy with Live Data Gateway’s ability to migrate Views between environments, and also with how easy and quick it has been to deploy.”
Alan Golding, Solution Consulting Manager, APOS