Data Fabric

Greenfield, Brownfield, Bluefield and now Orangefield - what is the most successful S/4 conversion for the existing SAP customer? Green- and Brownfield are commonly known transformation rules for an SAP release change from ERP/ECC 6.0 with AnyDB to Hana and S/4. Blue- and Orangefield are creations of successful SAP partners with added value beyond the technical release change. Bluefield has already been successfully implemented in the SAP community, while Power of Orange is a young concept that is a summary of existing tools.

Accordingly, SAP's color theory is difficult to evaluate because the existing customer should choose between proven methods and proprietary solutions. An important source of computer science can be found at ETH Zurich, where Professor Niklaus Wirth once taught and wrote the standard IT work "Algorithms and Data Structures". Already the title explains the whole concept. These structures can be specified by various techniques, such as relational database, graph databases or blockchain. Processes must be applied to the structures so that data ultimately becomes information. Algorithms and data structures are the two sides of the same coin.

Trivial? Not quite, because it took almost half a century for Niklaus Wirth's concept to be understood and for the analysts at Gartner to declare the concept of Data Lake obsolete and proclaim the age of Data Fabric. Data Fabric attempts to consolidate all data, but strives to preserve the web of relationships so that knowledge about processes is not lost.