SAP Data Hub V2

Data Fabric, Hub and Sphere

Following NetWeaver, BW and Data Hub, SAP has presented another solution designed to give customers access to business-critical data. SAP is introducing the Datasphere solution, the next generation of its data management portfolio. SAP also announced strategic partnerships with data and AI companies Collibra, Confluent, Databricks and DataRobot. The partnerships are designed to enable companies to build a unified data architecture (once again) that securely brings together SAP software and third-party data.

From Hub to Sphere

From the very beginning of ERP software development, the focus was on data. With the book "Algorithms and Data Structures" by the legendary computer science professor Niklaus Wirth of the ETH Zurich, all programmers became aware that in the future there would be two tasks in the construction of applications: Process and algorithms are to be built and, in parallel, a consistent quantity structure and suitable data structures are to be constructed.

The organization of data management has always been a challenge at SAP, because in the beginning it was left to database providers such as Oracle, IBM and Microsoft, and in the end they obviously underestimated the scope of the project with their own database: After the failed attempt of the SAP Data Hub, SAP is now trying it with Datasphere.

File systems

SAP has always lived the importance of data and also expressed it to the users. Internally, however, the topic was only treated as a secondary issue and the connected databases from Oracle, IBM and Microsoft were only used as file systems. A real added value through the DB functionality of the providers was obviously never intended. With Business Warehouse, Data Hub and now Datasphere, data sovereignty is to remain with the ERP provider.

Solution seeks problem

SAP has understood the challenge and despite attempts in the past with the SAP Data Hub, the ERP world market leader now explained: "Until now, accessing and using data that resides in different systems and locations, such as cloud providers, data providers and on-prem systems, has been a complex challenge. Customers had to extract data from its original storage locations and export it to a central location. In the process, important contextual information was lost and could only be recovered with special, ongoing IT projects and manual effort. With SAP Datasphere, this effort is a thing of the past. Customers have the ability to design a data fabric architecture for managing business data that quickly delivers meaningful data with business context and logic intact."

From SAP's point of view it could be right, but in the SAP partner community there are numerous solutions to these challenges. Data fabric was defined as a major IT trend many years ago by analysts at Gartner, and was thus quickly picked up by SAP partners as well. Any existing SAP customer interested in Datasphere would be well advised to look around the community for the time being. All problems correctly identified by SAP have been solved for many years with third-party solutions from SAP partners.