Extend SAP with Oracle Cloud

The reasons for choosing an alternative provider can be manifold. In addition to the usual comparisons in terms of costs and functional scope, consideration should also be given to whether new applications and technologies will also meet future requirements for agility and openness.

It is no use if a new solution integrates seamlessly into the existing SAP environment, but further options are excluded because the required flexibility or standardized interfaces are missing.

Oracle Cloud

Whereas in earlier times a decision for or against a manufacturer virtually meant a commitment for (professional) life, this has changed massively in the age of cloud computing: If the interfaces are open and transparent and the manufacturer's cloud portfolio is comprehensive, it is possible to try out a new solution quickly and at short notice to see whether it delivers what it promises.

You can then go productive with it immediately and also respond to larger loads promptly if needed.

For those who are not comfortable outsourcing their SAP extension to the cloud, vendors often offer different options for running applications hybrid in the cloud and on premise (or possibly only on premise, which of course makes some of the advantages of a cloud solution obsolete).

Oracle, for example, now offers almost its entire application and technology portfolio in the cloud. This means that extensions to existing SAP landscapes can be implemented without any problems. Particularly for the area of business intelligence and enterprise performance management, it does not necessarily have to be SAP solutions that bring added value.

According to a survey of 1,200 CIOs worldwide by the consulting firm Deloitte, 77 percent confirm the importance of BI tools for their own company and 88 percent said they intend to make medium and high investments in this area.

All-Data and Self-Service BI

In general, Oracle can also score with its analysis and evaluation solutions with SAP users in two areas in particular: as "all-data analytics" for Big Data and data warehouses, and as a data visualization tool and self-service application for the integration of own data with cloud applications.

Oracle also offers preconfigured and integrated BI solutions for its own ERP, CRM or HCM applications. However, those who do not want to set up their entire application stack from scratch should look into extensions to their SAP landscape from the Oracle Cloud.

Experience shows that cloud solutions are easiest to implement if the data to be processed is already in the cloud. This is because defined interfaces to other systems are then already available, such as data from customer experience management systems (CX).

In the SAP world, however, this is often not so easy because SAP systems are rarely used as if they were off the shelf, which is why the interfaces are often not implemented in the standard. In practice, BI is often about analyzing data across the board and consolidating information from the ERP system with data from CRM or customer experience applications in a data warehouse. What is new is that users are demanding more flexibility than existing data warehouse solutions can offer.

Modern data visualization and self-service tools from Oracle close this gap in demand. Users can thus independently combine local data with data from the cloud and thus quickly create new meaningful evaluations.

For example, ready-made cloud applications, such as Oracle Enterprise Performance Reporting Cloud, help speed up reporting and publish business deals faster.

The Oracle Data Visualization Cloud Service enables easy consolidation and integration of on-premises spreadsheets into a cloud environment and offers high data security and availability for mobile users in addition to a wide range of analysis functions.

Enterprise Performance Management

The Oracle EPM applications emerge from the corporate performance management solutions of Hyperion, which were acquired by Oracle in March 2007 and have been continuously developed further. They primarily automate tasks that have to be completed in the CFO office, such as consolidation of financial data, planning and budgeting, risk reporting and the publication of business figures.

Ultimately, these are predefined processes that must run according to existing laws and regulations.

The Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service is used, for example, by companies that are present with worldwide subsidiaries. For them, a uniform reporting and planning tool can be provided without having to work with the same ERP system worldwide.

The Oracle Business Intelligence Cloud Service integrates the different data from the various ERP, CRM and EPM applications and thus also offers a wide range of evaluation options in the cloud. The import of data extracts from SAP systems can also be automated via a standardized interface.

How SAP Becomes Big Data Capable

The playing field of business intelligence can be expanded even further by including Big Data, i.e. large volumes of unstructured data from various sources. For example, this opens the way to the Internet of Things (IoT), which is essential for Industry 4.0 scenarios.

The market research company Gartner estimates that the number of networked devices in the Internet of Things will grow to as many as 20.8 billion by 2020. It is therefore not surprising that, according to a study by Forrester, 34 percent of companies in Europe give IoT and machine-to-machine activities a high to critical priority.

The resulting mountains of data can, of course, only be analyzed meaningfully and profitably with appropriate Big Data solutions. With the Oracle Big Data Discovery Tool, the different data formats in Hadoop can be analyzed automatically - conspicuities, deviations and patterns are displayed visually in dashboards and users can see at a glance where it is worth going deeper into data exploration.

Oracle Big Data SQL technology acts as a bridge between the Big Data world and the data warehouse systems and thus enables flexible evaluations on almost all sources. Here, the same analysis tools are used that are also available as Oracle Cloud Service.

The examples of Oracle EPM and Oracle BI with Big Data for IoT/M2M therefore show that it is well worth questioning application solutions that are supposedly without alternatives and taking advantage of the opportunities that the new cloud delivery model also offers in terms of software procurement.