This was the first askSAP Analytics Innovations Community call for 2020. Link to the slides is here.

Link to the replay is here.

Source: SAP

Source: SAP

The askSAP calls occur are typically held quarterly to give our Analytics community the opportunity to learn more about our analytics strategy and products. Also to provide a forum where you can get questions answered and give feedback to SAP.

This 90 minute call will provide opportunities for audience interaction through Q&A sessions and polls

Source: SAP

SAP’s legal disclaimer with regards to discussion and information shared about future product and features

Source: SAP

Matt runs global SAP HANA and database solution management and go to market team

Views and trends in data management space, and SAP’s vision and cover recent announcements, and how work together

Source: SAP

Data is there; organizations who look at data as a an asset are different, drive confident business decisions

Organizations with a strong data foundation have a strategic advantage.

Source: SAP

Data to run business needs to be relevant, timely and accurate

IT/business needs more agility to spin up solutions, and connect data wherever it resides

Drives complexity; “data is currency of intelligent enterprise”

Data has exploded with new data sources, and plan for new data sources – image, video, audio

New demands on data – what is going to happen, using machine learning, automate into business processes

Work loads are moving to the cloud – line between on premise and cloud is blurring

Source: SAP

Many struggle with turning data into business outcomes

Have data in several platforms; data is getting too complex to manage; this limits agility

Data is less accessible

Difficulty in operationalize data science

Legal and regulatory risks; missing data lineage

Source: SAP

Technology landscapes are becoming more diverse; many are not just running SAP solutions

Expect landscapes to be more diverse; how get visibility all across this?

In the past, looked at EDW/Hadoop; but this proved costly

Source: SAP

SAP: intelligent enterprise; use data assets to empower employees to experience agility

Business technology platform to turn data into business value

Intelligent technology – AI, data driven insights, analytics (augmented BI, planning), database and data management, application development and integration

Source: SAP

Data plays pivotal role in digital economy, regardless of location, size, or format

Provide data foundation to become a ‘data super power”

Data value equation – how maximize data of value (not SAP specific)

Amount, quality and usage – if any are missing, then data doesn’t bring maximum value

Cloud solution – HANA Cloud, single gateway to data

With DWC – support speed of business

SAC – augmented BI

Source: SAP

HANA Cloud – next chapter in HANA story

HANA Journey; SAP launched 10 years ago – in memory, combining analytics and platform

32K customers

SAP HANA Cloud – cornerstone for business technology platform

Source: SAP

Pathway to cloud; extend workload

3 pillars: on premise, cloud, hybrid

Source: SAP

SAP HANA Cloud is now GA for public consumption

Change in cloud offering, foundation for SAC/DWC

Help with data management challenge, single access layer, scalable data processing and storage

Source: SAP

SAP HANA Cloud provides the power of HANA, single access layer across data landscape

Multi cloud support – deploy on any hyper scaler of your choice

Only pay what you consume, consumption based

Managed by SAP

Source: SAP

Link for more information

SAP Analytics Cloud in 2020

What’s New, What’s Next

Source: SAP

Key positioning for SAP Analytics Cloud

Source: SAP

Some top innovations for SAP Analytics Cloud in Q1 include the Qualtrics Connector, new data actions in planning, search to insight on Mobile devices, and some Smart Insight enhancements

Experience & operational data in SAC

Source: SAP

Integration with BusinessObjects BI4.3

•Smart discovery for universes

•Live SAP HANA Smart Insights

•Smart predict tighter integration into stories for BI and planning thanks to live predict

Planning:

•Data point commenting on live models

•Advanced Formulas: time functions

•Data Action Scheduling

Intelligent Enterprise

•Cloud for customer embedded (beta)

•Successfactors People Analytics GA

Enterprise Readiness

•Android support

•Scheduling

*Export story to PowerPoint

Source: SAP

The second half 2020 plans are shown above; subject to change

Further focus on hybrid scenarios; separate connector from SAC to DWC

Planning and Predictive integration – “predictive planning”

Live commenting, data point commenting

Ask using your voice

Poll response from attendees:

Source: SAP

Ammar provided a guided tour of SAP Data Warehouse Cloud’s key features and use cases

Data warehousing is an important topic for SAP; will continue innovation on premise and in the cloud

Source: SAP

Announced at SAPPHIRE last year and launched 2019

End to end analytic data warehouse as a service

Built for IT and business persona

Single solution package, start from persistency to application layer, up to visualization (SAC)

With space elasticity and data tiering DWC addresses the growing Data Volume challenge and the need of efficient cost management

Advanced Modeling and Data Lifecycle Management services to consolidate and govern all your data in one central place

SAC is a seamless integral part of the solution to arrive an end-to-end experience

DWC addresses the business domain by delivering business content and semantics and empowering business users

Source: SAP

The White House is dealing with the challenge of data

Shadow IT challenges, data silo challenges

Power users end up using spreadsheets to combine data and email items back and forth.

They also combine third party data and it starts becoming a manual process and different users may have different interpretations of the data.

Spreadsheets age, and before they know it, everything is out of sync so no one has a “single view” of truth from the data.

Making decisions on old data

Source: SAP

DWC provides a unified data platform designed for business and IT collaboration

DWC offers a modern user experience tailored for multiple Personas in between your line of business and the IT department.

DWC has instant access to application data via pre-built extractors, adaptors for various source systems, and you can replicate with zero configuration.

A central repository featuring a rich set of business semantics as foundation to enable the holistic data to value stream within your company.

Business is empowered to do self service modeling

At the heart of business empowerment and collaboration is the concept of “spaces”.

For business users, spaces are “dedicated working spaces” to model and analyze data.

For IT, spaces consist of compute and storage resources that can be allocated for a specific project or team. Each space is isolated from the others and has its own storage and compute resources, metadata objects, connections and users.

Business users leverage them to intuitively connect, discover and model data. For example, a line of business manager could use her space to connect data from an on-premise enterprise system and Twitter data by selecting these sources from a catalog of available sources with a few mouse clicks. She could then use graphic modeling to add semantics to the data and establish their relationship. She could even leverage SAP Analytics Cloud directly from her space to build a story and visualize results – all while leveraging powerful out-of-the-box advanced analytics on all her data. Then, to share the result of her work. All recipients will be able to see the same results as they will all be accessing the same information she sees. Instead of receiving a spreadsheet or a screenshot, which becomes obsolete in seconds, they will all rely on live, up-to-date information coming from a single source of truth.

IT provisions and monitors spaces. From a technology standpoint, spaces are elastic compute and storage resources that are allocated for a specific project or to a specific team.

Spaces are decoupled and insulated from each other. It is possible to monitor resource usage for each space individually and have visibility of consumption compared to plan for full transparency and accountability. It is possible to change the resources associated with each space – manually or automatically according to agreed KPIs. Technical personnel physically connect authorized data sources in the cloud and on-premises, and, when necessary, set up replication and transformation processes. Technical staff also manage user credential and access rights

Business users consume the data and the resources associated with a given space independently from IT and gain trusted insights without delay.

IT can be rest assured that enterprise-class data governance is enforced and that the business can confidently make insights from trusted reliable data.

Source: SAP

To empower users to work well in a hybrid environment, it is important to make it easy and efficient to add and consume new data sources.

Also it is important is to make data available without the latency and unnecessary data duplications.

With state of the art virtualization (with HANA Cloud), real-time replication, and openness to third-party tools, SAP Data Warehouse Cloud enables IT departments to efficiently connect data SAP and non-SAP data across cloud and on-premises. They can automate replication schedules, monitor data transfers, apply transformations, and track data lineage. Plus, Data Warehouse Cloud comes with a built-in understanding of SAP systems, making it easier to securely leverage data from your digital core. At the same time, business users can consume enterprise and external data sources with a few mouse clicks, avoiding time-consuming data duplication and spreadsheet maintenance.

Source: SAP

Business layer allows users to understand data in their terms

Data Warehouse Cloud has this covered by two tightly coupled modelling layers that describe the data both as it’s stored, and as a set of related business entities.

Business users can address the data using familiar business concepts rather than navigate the sometimes difficult concept of underlying data structures. With this powerful management of the metadata business users can work independently of IT and focus on further innovation.

Source: SAP

SAP knows many of you may already have investments in other SAP technologies or other systems. SAP Data Warehouse Cloud was built with the knowledge that you may have data in lots of places. That’s why it was built to connect to many data sources simultaneously, and integrate that data into single experience using SAP HANA Cloud. DWC can help you get quickly started increasing the productivity of your data whether you are using wherever it resides. And we will integrate your systems whether on-premises, a hybrid solution or purely in the cloud.

Source: SAP

SAP Data Warehouse Cloud addresses many business requirements due to the ease of use, rich feature set and functionality. Above are some typical scenarios where SAP Data Warehouse Cloud would be an ideal solution.

Hybrid empowers business users and administrators to easily leverage SAP and non-SAP data sources (“connect and not collect”)

In the Data Mart scenario, SAP Data Warehouse Cloud empowers users to become self-sufficient by delivering dedicated ‘spaces’ for modeling and data analysis, point-and-click access to corporate and external data, delivering “out-of-the-box” advanced analytics for superior experience, delivering Enterprise-class data governance for trusted insights without data duplication, and connect data efficiently without moving it

Cross-Application Warehousing scenario allows minimized data copies with centrally governed data access, secure collaboration through role-based security and the ability to share objects between spaces, self-organized and isolated modeling environments, graphical and SQL view modeling capabilities included, native enhanced data transformation and harmonization tooling, open to 3rd party ETL tools, superior user experience for both business & IT users, supports different types of data with engines designed to analyze complex and unconventional data sets, and real-time advanced analytics and machine learning capabilities

2nd poll:

Q&A

Q: Can SAC connect directly to SAP HANA Cloud

A: Yes

Q: How is this (HANA Cloud) different from SAP HANA as a Service?

A: Technology perspective – hot/warm/cold and data lake capabilities – different engines at disposal with more services coming (Sybase services)

Out of the box adapters to HANA on premise

Q: What about replacement for SAP BusinessObjects Explorer?

A: Working on SAC exploration mode, directly access, short cut

Have wikis for user cases

____________________________

Note: I was the moderator for this webcast and a big thank you to SAP for asking me.  Special thanks to Pam Barrowcliffe, Meg Kuang, Ina Felsheim  and Thierry AUDAS for their help.

Twitter stats are below:

SAP Analytics Cloud shows the day of the ask SAP webcast, March 31, was the top tweeted day.

Top tweeters are shown above

Tweet counts by source – Twitter for iPhone was the top used app

Some word counts are shown above; no surprise that “data” and “SAP” are top words

Word Cloud from R package in SAP Analytics Cloud