SAP is launching a set of unique enterprise information management (EIM) tools that will help simplify how data is used in business processes and shared across business networks along with enhancements to security, improving areas such as customer experience, supplier collaboration, and employee engagement.
“We make the data beautiful and ready for consumption,” said Philip On, vice president of EIM at SAP. “Companies today really need to manage information as an enterprise asset. Enterprise data needs to be readily available, governed, and well understood and recent innovations from SAP are really going to help with that.”
The SAP Agile Data Preparation tool is being updated to introduces new data aggregation and filtering capabilities that can help users speed up the time it takes to combine multiple or large data sets and view only the data that has significantly changed.
Prepared data sets can then be shared and consumed by analytical applications, such as SAP Lumira software, or used in data migration and master governance scenarios, enabling users to spend more time analyzing the data instead of preparing it.
“Business users interact with a spreadsheet like interface to prepare and clean their data,” On said. “Think of it like an Excel Spreadsheet on steroids. We can play with the information, change it, and add formulas. You’re able to impact change across the company so that the whole company benefits from those changes.”
Along with updates to the Agile Data Preparation platform, the 4.2 SP6 version of SAP Data Services software offers enhanced support for Hadoop, NoSQL, JSON and spatial data.
By responding to requests from customers, SAP and Google have collaborated to bring bidirectional extract-transform-load (ETL) capabilities to Google BigQuery. This solution helps not just write data to but also move data from BigQuery.
"No other ETL vendor can offer bi-directional support moving data to and from BigQuery,” On said. “We’re the first to offer this and we’re happy to partner with Google to make this happen.”
The management of policies across an enterprise will become easier than before with the 4.2 SP6 version of the SAP Information Steward software.
This update introduces information policy management capabilities to help centralize policy creation and maintenance as well as simplify collaboration and governance.
Additionally, SAP is upgrading its Master Data Governance platform to help span master data domains and support consolidation and central governance use cases in a single product.
Version 8.0 can now consolidate master data from heterogeneous SAP and non-SAP sources, to create a single best record. Clean and standardized data can then be shared and synchronized across cloud and on premise applications.
“SAP is the only vendor in the market that offers a master data management solution that can do both consolidation and central create,” On said.
These enhancements will benefit the line of business users as well as IT, according to On.
“With all of these recent advancements, we hope to help our customers support the digital economy by simplifying our customers’ ability to improve and maintain data quality to gain greater insights from more data sources such as big data, cloud, and spatial,” On said.
For more information, visit go.sap.com.