Wednesday, July 21, 2021

Digital Transformation & Non-SAP Data Assets

We recently published a post to the SAP Community site discussing the role of non-SAP data assets in SAP analytics in particular and digital transformations in general. You can read the full article here.

The point of the post was to highlight the importance of non-SAP data assets in BI and analytics, and how these assets need to be considered in every organization’s digital transformation. As SAP CEO Christian Klein said in his keynote at SAPPHIRE NOW 2021, digital transformation must include business process transformation. To build business processes, you need to create data workflows using all pertinent data assets.

According to recent polling:

• 94% of organizations require access to multiple data sources to support decision making.
• Fully half of organizations surveyed use 5 or more internal and 3 or more external data sources to support decision making.
• 18% of organizations use 20 or more data sources for decision making.
• 90% of big data and analytics software market share comes from non-SAP data environments.

Given the rising number of hyperscalers and purpose-designed data repositories, having all of your data in a single source is a dream not likely to be realized any time soon, so organizations need ways to connect to and consume that data in their SAP analytics applications.

Our blog post goes on to provide use cases in which APOS Live Data Gateway has been used by organizations to connect live to non-SAP assets so that those data assets can be consumed in SAP analytics applications, including SAP S/4HANA and SAP Analytics Cloud.

About a year ago, ASUGForward hosted a webinar with APOS customer W.R. Grace, who showed how they APOS Live Data Gateway to connect Google BigQuery to SAP Analytics Cloud. You can learn more about this use case here.