SAP Data Hub and the Rise of a New Generation of Analytics Solutions

“Companies are looking for a unified and open approach to help them accelerate and expand the flow of data across their data landscapes for all users.

SAP Data Hub bridges the gap between Big Data and enterprise data, enabling companies to build applications that extract value from data across the organization, no matter if it lies in the cloud or on premise, in a data lake or the enterprise data warehouse, or in an SAP or non-SAP system.”

This is part of what Bernd Leukert, SAP’s member of the executive board for products & innovation mentioned during SAP’s Big Data Event held at the SAP Hudson Yards office in New York City as part of the new SAP Data Hub announcement and one that, in my view, marked the beginning of a small yet important trend within analytics consisting on the launch or renewed and integrated software platforms for analytics, BI and data science.

This movement, marked by other important announcements including Teradata’s New Analytics Platform as well as IBM’s Integrated Analytics offering marks another step directed towards what appear a movement to a new generation of platforms and a consolidation of functions and features for data analysis and data science.

According to SAP, the motivation for the new SAP Data Hub solution offers customers a:

Simpler, more scalable approach to data landscape integration, management and governance
Easier creation of powerful data processing pipelines to accelerate and expand data-centric projects
Modern, open architecture approach that includes support for different data storage systems

One way SAP aims to achieve this with its Data Hub solution is to create value among all the intricate and diverse data management process that goes from data collection, passing through integration and transformation, to its preparation for generating insight and action.

To increase efficiency for all management stages including data integration, data orchestration and data governance the new SAP Data Hub creates “data pipelines” to accelerate business results, these all, coordinated under a centralized “Data Operations Cockpit”.

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For what we can see, SAP aims to let the new solution emerge as the ideal data management platform for the rest of the SAP analytics and BI product stack ーincluding neat integration with SAP HANA and the ability to take advantage of solutions like SAP Vora, SAP’s in-memory, distributed computing solutionー as well as with core Big Data sources including Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark (see figure below).

SAP’s Data Hub General Architecture (Courtesy of SAP)

SAP Data Hub’s data pipes can access, process and transform data coming from different sources into information, to be used along with external computation and analytics libraries including Google’s TensorFlow.

Another interesting aspect of the new SAP Data Hub is that aims to provide an agile and easier way to develop and deploy data-driven applications, allowing via a central platform to develop and configure core data management activities and workflows to fasten the development process and speed results.

Key functional elements included within the new platform include:

Some of SAP’s Data Hub Major Functional Elements (Courtesy of SAP)

According to SAP this new solution will become, along with SAP Vora and SAP Cloud Platform Big Data Services a key component of SAP's Leonardo digital innovation system.

Analytics and BI on the Verge of a New Generation

As companies witness how their data landscapes grow and become more complex, new solutions are taking over the new analytics landscape and, as this has been pushed in great measure by new companies in the likes of Tableau, Qlik, or Dataiku to name just a few.

It seems now big software powerhouses are pushing hard to come with a new generation of tools to consolidate their data management and analytics offering.

With this, is not difficult to foresee a new competitive arena in a race to gain the favor of a totally new generation of data specialists, one I’m eager to keep track of, of course.

In the meantime take a look below at SAP’s Data Hub intro video and get a glimpse of this new solution.

Of course, please do let me know if you have a comment or feedback, lets keep the conversation.