SAP and Google Cloud are strengthening their collaboration on cloud data management. The integration will allow customers to address data in real time without duplication.
The integration creates several additions to RISE with SAP, a bundle that includes the ERP S/4HANA. Specifically, SAP Datasphere and Google Cloud BigQuery come together to access data from various origins. As additional functionality, SAP touts its ability to bring together internal data on its platform and data from external sources.
The current expansion follows the launch of Datasphere in early March. With Datasphere, companies can construct a data fabric to eliminate challenges around accessing data from different systems and locations. “Customers have had to extract data from original sources and export it to a central location, losing critical business context along the way and recapturing it only through ongoing, dedicated IT projects and manual effort. With today’s announcements, SAP Datasphere helps eliminate this hidden data tax, enabling customers to build a business data fabric architecture that quickly delivers meaningful data with business context and logic intact,” SAP said at the time.
Now there is the link to the data warehouse BigQuery. It should allow companies to access critical data from SAP systems in real-time without data duplication. It combines data from SAP software, such as S/4HANA and HANA Cloud. This gives companies a more complete view of data in Google’s data warehouse.
Partners
SiliconANGLE rightly notes that the partnership between SAP and Google Cloud is already long-standing. Regarding BigQuery, Google’s cloud division at least has a laundry list of collaborations up its sleeve. The data warehouse can handle data across different cloud environments, according to Google, with help from built-in AI/ML tools for faster insights.
Typically, it can be a heck of a job for companies to keep track of the data it holds. The two parties hope to provide organisations with a “simplified data landscape” through collaboration. In terms of applications, the partners see many opportunities in all kinds of sectors by eliminating data silos. Consider the splitting of data between finance and marketing departments. Bringing this data together on a platform like BigQuery brings better visibility.
What does this mean for the market?
In the cloud market, there are many players besides Google Cloud. It is said to have a 10% market share by 2022, nearly doubling from 2017. Services like Azure and AWS are considerably larger, at 23% and 32%, respectively. Google Cloud may thus count itself among the top three, but that distorts the proportions somewhat. SAP is in a similar position in the ERP market, where it battles with Microsoft Dynamics and Oracle for the lead position.
As for Google Cloud BigQuery, there are also competing solutions for data warehouses/lakehouses. For example, Databricks provides a lakehouse platform that is fully integrated into the cloud service, while Snowflake is also dominant. In short, for consumers, there are multiple options and we cannot yet pinpoint a winner in the rapidly evolving data analytics landscape.