Changing Big Data for Enterprises – SAP Data Hub

Big Data undoubtedly is a major trend changing business ecosystems in a rapid manner. Although analysts estimate the Big Data market to be about $100 billion in 2020, it is currently quite fragmented with many providers tackling different aspects of the Big Data spectrum. From our perspective, the integration of Big Data into the SAP world is missing in the current offerings.

Although a significant impact of Big Data on enterprises already exists, we see several inhibitors which cause the associated business models to be still quite immature at this point, hence the major transformation that the economy will face from Big Data is still to come. These inhibitors are from our experience and discussions with customers:

• Missing link between Big Data and Enterprise Data: Even in the Big Data world, Data is kept in silos (files, Hadoop, Data Warehouses) across the enterprise causing that users cannot work with it according to their needs.
• Big Data technologies lacking Enterprise readiness: Every Big Data component has a different Product Availability Matrix (PAM) and requires a different operations model, different skills to operate it, etc. There are neither a holistic lifecycle management nor security concepts available.
• High effort to produce scenarios across the Enterprise: Enterprise-wide Big Data scenarios require high investments in resources and many non- integrated technologies, such as Hadoop, Spark, etc. which are needed to address the respective business needs. The resulting integration effort prevents business value creation.

It has always been SAP solutions’ value proposition to support end-to-end enterprise scenarios and we are dedicated to extend this to the Big Data world. The SAP portfolio already has many bits and pieces required for integrating the Big Data into the SAP world, but we have adapted our strategy and developed state-of-the-art technology to tackle the new challenges.

Our overall vision is to lead digital transformation with an enterprise data hub, which helps our

customers cope with rapid change and emerging data sources. SAP Data Hub establishes a new category of software solutions to establish data driven applications while keeping an eye on meta data management and governance.

SAP Data Hub offers the definition of powerful data pipelines which are flow-based applications consisting of reusable and configurable operators for all kind of data operations. It enables customers to process data, reuse existing code and libraries (for example, Spark SQL, Python, and Scala), connect to messaging systems (Kafka, MQTT, NATS, and WAMP), to databases (SAP HANA), as well as to store and read data (HDFS, and S3). Furthermore, customers can manipulate arbitrary data with JavaScript engines, use process operators to execute any code – stateful and stateless – or operators for type conversion, and add machine-learning or image-processing functions. Finally, customers can also add customized operators to the data pipelines.

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