Cloud-based data platform for building a business data fabric that enables simple, standardized access to SAP data and integration with non-SAP data for both technical and business users.
SAP was founded in 1972 as a business applications company but really came into prominence in the 1990s with the ERP boom. Its ERP solution (R/3) was first released in 1992. The vendor employs more than 100,000 people worldwide and had revenues of $30.87 billion in 2022. Today, SAP is one of the largest business software vendors in the world.
For many years, SAP Business Warehouse (BW) was its strategic offering and foundation for building business intelligence applications. BW is a package consisting of connectors, relational data storage, subject-oriented multidimensional structured data marts and predefined content as well as tools for reporting, analysis and planning, providing a plug-and-play BI solution. However, BW is considered technically complex and has weaknesses in terms of connectivity and its support of self-service analytics for business users. SAP Data Warehouse Cloud was launched in November 2019 as SAP’s new offering for data warehousing in the public cloud to specifically addresses these points. With its rebranding to SAP Datasphere in March 2023, SAP announced a new generation with improvements especially in the areas of data sharing and collaboration as well as in the sense of an open data ecosystem for the implementation of a business data fabric. The aim of the product is to provide a unified experience for data integration, data cataloging, semantic modeling and data virtualization – as well as data warehousing – which makes SAP Datasphere the strategic successor of SAP BW and SAP BW/4HANA.
While providing a flexible, cloud-based option for the enterprise data warehouse, the solution is also designed to empower line-of-business users to perform self-service analytics by means of a business semantic layer. It follows a federate-first approach to reduce or completely avoid upfront data movement. This increases agility and reduces the required data management footprint. It can be deployed as a standalone solution or to complement existing SAP or non-SAP data warehouses on-premises or in the cloud. It supports a wide range of connectivity to SAP and non-SAP data sources. SAP Datasphere data objects are exposed as tables and views. This makes it possible for external data pipelines and analytics tools to utilize them as target or source respectively. The solution offers a governed sandbox concept for combining enterprise data sources with individual and external data in a domain or use-case-specific area called Spaces. If required, sandbox results can be transferred as seamlessly as possible into the enterprise environment.
SAP Datasphere is one of the four fundamental pillars of SAP’s data and analytics strategy. Together with SAP Master Data Governance, it forms the backbone of data management. Further pillars are SAP HANA Cloud as the underlying database and SAP Analytics Cloud for analytics and planning. SAP BW/4HANA will be supported until at least 2040. The general recommendation for SAP BW customers is to move to SAP Datasphere. SAP BW Bridge is an SAP Datasphere feature that provides a transition path to the public cloud and enables existing SAP BW customers to move existing data models to the strategic target solution SAP Datasphere.
BARC’s viewpoint on the product’s strengths and challenges.
The information contained in this section is based on user feedback and actual experience with SAP Datasphere.
The information and figures are largely drawn from BARC’s The BI & Analytics Survey, The Planning Survey, The Financial Consolidation Survey and The Data Management Survey. You can find out more about these surveys by clicking on the relevant links.
All key figures for SAP Datasphere at a glance.
Konnektivität, RealTime, Cloud.
Fehlende Funktionalitäten (noch).
Langsam beginnen.
Gut.
Selfservice für Endanwender. Konektivität zu Google BigQuery.
Berechtigungskonzept nicht gut. Keine Weiterreichung des Users an BigQuery, sondern eher den Systemuser. Keine Konsole. Wenig offene APIs außerhab des SAP Öko-Systems. Fehlender funktionaler Umfang von SAP Data Intelligence im größeren Style.
Auf das Sizing achten und klein zu starten.
Sehr gut, richtiges Produkt, auch wenn es etwas spät kommt im Vergleich zum Wettbewerb.
It can act as a unified semantic fabric making self-service development much more user intuitive.
Vendor promises a lot but hasn't yet delivered on many promises.
Use judiciously for specific self.service use cases for now. It's a long way away from becoming your enterprise data warehouse on the cloud as of now.
It's a good platform, but still needs to travel some distance before it can claim to be an enterprise grade DW solution.
Integration in bestehende SAP-Landschaft. Self-Service Modelling / Data-Preparation.
Fehlendes zentrales Monitoring Tool inkl. Warnung von Schwellwerten. Unzuverlässige Berechtigung-Synchronisation mit SAP BW. Wechselnde Empfehlungen der SAP zur idealen Konfiguration / Modellierung.
Datasphere ist gut geeignet als ergänzendes Self-Service Modelling Tool in einer bestehenden SAP Landschaft.
Datasphere ist noch nicht reif als vollwertiges Enterprise Data Warehouse und als SAP BW Nachfolger.
Creation of flows with tables in a single operation.
Improve functionality gaps, avoid system outages when patches/new features are installed.
Shifting from SAP BW to SAP DataSphere is quite a huge change in thinking.
Going in the right direction.
Neuer Ansatz von SAP auch non-SAP Datenquellen zu verbinden und in einem Business User (LOB) geeigneten UI zur Verfügung zu stellen.
Keine Unterstützung von quasi-Standard Interfaces (i.e. RestAPI), auch nicht auf der Roadmap geplant.
Genauen Überblick über die Architektur und relevanten Interfaces erstellen, um die Abdeckung durch Datasphere evaluieren zu können.
Gemischt.
Die geringe Einstiegshürde für nicht-SAP Experten (wie Fachanwender).
Die Performance der Datenabfragen muss weiter verbessert werden.
Startet am Besten von der 'grünen Wiese', Modellübernahme aus Altsystemen ist definitiv keine gute Idee, integriert die Fachanwender in den Implementierungsprozess.
Wir nutzen Datasphere bereits seit der Zeit, als es noch Data Warehouse Cloud (DWC) hieß. Die Schwächen der Anfangszeit wurden von SAP überwunden und SAP machte auch erhebliche Fortschritte mit der Performance. Vor diesem Hintergrund ist das Fazit: Datasphere ist ein sehr starkes Tool mit einer interessanten Entwicklung!
Optik.
Performance, Bedienbarkeit.
Datengrundlagen müssen gut vorbereitet sein.
Expertenbetreuung ist wichtig. Der Endanwender kann nicht einfach so starten im Self-Service.
