Unified Data and Analytics: A Partner’s Platform for Speed and Simplicity

It’s an understatement to say that businesses are facing enormous uncertainty, disruption, and change right now. The verdict is still out on whether things will ever return to normal; however, most executives recognize the importance of planning and adapting to change.

Business and technology partners are increasingly tapped to build, implement, extend, and integrate solutions, processes, and workflows into their customers’ existing hybrid landscape – all efforts requiring fast delivery of a platform that unifies data and analytics.

Redefining the data value equation

Partners must help their customers extract maximum value from their data and analytics investments.  For many SAP partners, the answer to delivering this foundation for data management, database, and analytics is SAP’s Business Technology Platform. This platform provides intelligence to customers by tying their operational and experience applications together.

At SAP, we’ve invested in four critical areas of the data value equation, along with a unified data and analytics cloud portfolio:

• Span – Data from anywhere – Integrate information through the management of master and pipeline data by extracting it from source databases, transforming and cleansing it, and loading it into a target database with SAP Data Intelligence Cloud.
• Amount – Data of any size – Handle large data volumes running with elastic memory and storage, and data lake options with SAP HANA Cloud.
• Quality – Data of any kind –  Apply data warehousing capabilities to blend, enrich, and govern real-time data with SAP Data Warehouse Cloud.
• Usage – Analytics for everyone –  Provide analytics for business intelligence, planning, and predictive analysis with SAP Analytics Cloud.

The following diagram depicts SAP’s data value equation and provides the ability for partners to connect SAP’s cloud solutions with on-premise solutions to help customer’s hybrid scenarios.

Solving game-changing challenges with data-driven innovation

This unified data and analytics foundation is designed to enable common shared services for data connectivity, elasticity, administration, semantics, and analytics, as well as machine learning, artificial intelligence, and content networks – which help partners build, implement, extend, and infuse solutions easier with customers.

Take, for example, The Gates Corporation. The manufacturer of fluid power and transmission solutions enables its customers and distributors to attach couplings onto hoses on its machines per various specifications. To help ensure a superior aftermarket experience, the company transformed its products with IoT devices to understand critical usage data – such as machine location and crimp frequency – across a core part of its business.

With the assistance of SAP’s Business Technology Platform, Gates’ partner, NIMBL, developed an Android application with SAP Cloud Platform and a Bluetooth-enabled, custom-printed circuit board attached to its industrial machines. Sensors and solenoids were embedded to analyze machine activity. SAP HANA Cloud and SAP Analytics Cloud were used to aggregate and consolidate data, and visualize real-time machine operations.

This project allowed Gates to become first in the market to introduce an innovative, entry-level product offering that would disrupt traditional manufacturing processes. By connecting machines, technologies, and operations, the manufacturer increased its ability to gain business insights, improve demand creation, and enable an intelligent platform that best serves its customers.

Helping Customers to be successful and innovative

Partners can help their customers be successful and innovative by providing simple and fast data and analytics cloud solutions which can help them adapt to this economic landscape.  With SAP’s Business Technology Platform, partners can unlock the full value of their customers’ data – whether locked in line-of-business solutions or in a wide variety of innovative and enterprise use cases.