A year ago, the tech giants Google Cloud and SAP embarked on a journey to revolutionize data analytics for businesses. Their goal: to bring together SAP systems and data with Google’s data cloud, offering customers better insights for decision making and innovation. The new SAP Datasphere Replication Flow connector for Google BigQuery is now
available.
From the outset, customers have been excited about the potential of this partnership: integrating SAP's robust data models and real-time processes with Google BigQuery's comprehensive real-time data streams, including search engine data, weather data, marketing data, and customer event data, to inspire new and better ways to do business.
Prior to this collaboration, businesses found it challenging to merge data models from either side due to cost, effort, and time. This partnership aims to eliminate these hurdles, providing real-time data streams that adjust dynamically to changes from Google Cloud and SAP. Haridas Nair, the Head of Cross Product Management for Database and Analytics at SAP, stated, "Customers using SAP Business Technology Platform can now extend the reach of curated and modeled SAP business data for downstream consumption with SAP Datasphere Replication Flow. The integration with BigQuery now enables customers to combine SAP business data with Google BigQuery data. This enables new use cases that can unleash significant business value."
For example, while enterprises rely on SAP S/4HANA for their financial planning, reporting, and budgeting there are many that also have finance data coming in other systems. Join ventures, new acquisitions or decentralized business models are common cases where finance data will reside in non-SAP S/4HANA systems. Early adopters of such companies are leveraging the Google Cloud and the SAP Datasphere Replication Flow connector to unify accounting data insights into SAP Datasphere to get a single financial dashboard across all their financial sources and thereby enable secure, self-service access to reusable data models, and streamline financial reporting. The result is enhanced analytics that enable new market correlations to transpire, as well as reporting efficiency and reduced data management costs. As such finance and operations experts can receive new insights that improve their business planning.
The other common use case relates to Consumer Products and Retail companies. A prime example is a North American consumer products company selling through retailers as well as their online platform. As many other companies in this space, they're investing in brand loyalty and scaling their product portfolio to target different customer segments. The company strives to corelate online customer trends with their retail channel sales using demographics and other consumer data.
Their business goals involve improving channel inventory turns, trade promotion management, shelf-availability, SKU margins, and overall understanding of customer buying behavior. Simultaneously, they aim to reduce the cost, effort, and time for accessing SAP data and enable richer SAP ERP data in real-time.
To achieve these goals, they have connected Google Cloud and SAP data to gain better insight into their retail channels and to improve their demand forecasting and supply chain algorithms. The more real-time the connectivity between their SAP data and Google BigQuery data, the more confident they'll be in the predictive algorithms they adopt for their supply chain.
But this is just the beginning. The Google Cloud and SAP Analytics partnership opens the door to a wide range of strategic customer and supply chain programs that leverage data for advanced predictive demand models. Early examples of customer innovations include true customer 360 insight, improved sales performance, yield-driven pricing, new product introductions, unifying external accounting with SAP, manufacturing automation, and operationalizing sustainability.
Both of the Google Cloud and SAP development organizations are excited to see that their work is making a difference. Future releases plan to include more advanced features for managing enterprise scale federation, replication and data catalogs between their respective data platforms. Honza Fedak, Director of BigQuery Engineering at Google Cloud stated, "The combination of Google Cloud's data and AI expertise and SAP's deep understanding of business data is a powerful force that can help businesses unlock the full potential of their data."
As more enterprises utilize this partnership, we are confident that the Google Cloud and SAP analytics partnership can provide better insights, enable better decisions, and foster innovation. This partnership is a significant step towards creating more Intelligent Enterprises, and we hope your enterprise will be one of them.
