Consolidating Data Sources With SAP Data Warehouse Cloud 

Bringing business data together is critical for reporting and analysis for modern business. SAP Data Warehouse Cloud solves this pain point easily.

If ever there was a time that a business could get by using data from a single source, that time has passed. For most organizations today, driving relevant insights from data analysis requires combining data from multiple sources. Much of the data you need to understand what is happening with your business originates within the organization, but by no means all of it.

In fact, one of the biggest challenges facing organizations today is the rapid growth of the number of external data sources they rely on. Not only is the number of these data sources increasing, but the volume of data coming out of them is skyrocketing. Meanwhile, of course, the number of data sources within the organization (and the volume of data produced by each) is also growing rapidly.

A Scenario

Imagine, for example, you have a marketing campaign running on multiple online channels. The campaign includes ads run on targeted sites related to your market, Google search ads, and ads on a variety of social channels, including Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube. To make best use of your marketing dollars, you need to know which of these channels are performing best—not just which ones are getting the most clicks, but which are most effective in initiating a customer interaction that ultimately leads to a sale.

Each online channel provides click statistics in its own format. So before you can assess how the different channels compare to each other on clicks—much less explore the relationship between clicks and revenue—there is some work to do. You need to bring all the statistics from the various sources into a common format. You’ll never get a clear picture of the effectiveness of the various channels unless you can consolidate and harmonize that data. And even when you have data from all of these external sources aligned, you’re still not there. That might be enough to tell you which channel is performing best in terms of clicks, but to tie those results into revenue, you’re going to have to synch up all that external data with internal data from your CRM system, along with data from various sales and marketing systems.

Bringing it All Together

SAP Data Warehouse Cloud provides everything you need to perform such analyses: connectors to hundreds of data sources, modeling tools to define the consolidated data structures, and data flows that map the various sources to the consolidated structure. SAP Data Warehouse Cloud provides instant access to application data via pre-built extractors as well as adapters for data integration from various source systems. The result? A central repository that consolidates data from all of the different needed data sources and provides a single data model for reporting and analysis.

For example, business users can easily access and use Data Warehouse Cloud without the level of support normally required from IT. With SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, a business user can quickly implement a dedicated data mart or a full data warehouse containing terabytes of data. In the example outlined above, using Data Warehouse Cloud you could easily bring together your internal CRM, sales, and marketing data with ad data from each of the named vendors.

SAP Data Warehouse Cloud also supports one-off agile scenarios. So if, in the example described above, you wanted to add Instagram ads to your campaign on a trial basis, you could easily include that data in your analysis along with data from the other sources.

A Solution for Business and Power Users

SAP Data Warehouse Cloud represents a new kind of collaboration between IT and the business. Although IT support isn’t required for setting up a data warehousing solution, SAP Data Warehouse Cloud does support an environment fully integrated with backend systems and able to support real-time and predictive analytics, meaning it supports not just business users but analysts, data scientists, and other power users.

Getting all of the data to talk together is one of the biggest challenges modern businesses face. SAP Data Warehouse Cloud solves that problem with a rich set of business semantics as a foundation to enable holistic data management, including both internal and external data sources. And it provides a modern user experience tailored for multiple personas.

Try out SAP Data Warehouse Cloud and sign up for the free trial today!