Webinar Summary – Expand Live & Import Data Connection Options for SAP Analytics Cloud and the SAP Solution Landscape – Featuring SAP’s Blair Wheadon

On Thursday, October 15, 2020, SAP’s Blair Wheadon joined APOS COO Allan Pym and APOS Solution Consulting Manager Alan Golding to discuss options for expanding live and import data connections for SAP Analytics Cloud, as well as other products within the SAP solution landscape with APOS Live Data Gateway, and APOS Live Data Gateway Premium Edition.

Blair Wheadon – SAC high-level use cases

Blair began by reviewing SAP Analytics Cloud high-level use cases.

He then laid out the three levels of self service for SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Data Warehouse Cloud.

Blair Wheadon – SAC self service

Blair finished by noting the importance of live data access for self-service analytics. Key advantages to live data access include:

• Retaining the SAP context for your data
• Delivering real-time data
• Retaining existing security models
• Keeping data within the firewall
• Delivering consistent data for all users
• Letting you focus on business with governed, accurate, trusted data

Blair Wheadon – advantages to live data

Allan Pym described the nature of import connections (extracted, acquired data).

Nature of import, extract, acquire

Allan introduced APOS Live Data Gateway, which is is a middleware platform which provides virtualized data connection and data transformation to enable live data connectivity and expanded data source options for SAP Analytics Cloud and the SAP Solution landscape.

APOS Live Data Gateway – introduction

The benefits of APOS Live Data Gateway closely mirror Blair’s description of the advantages of live data connectivity:

• Data never leaves the firewall
• No data latency
• Leverage data from existing location
• Leverage existing modelling
• Leverage existing security

In addition, APOS Live Data Gateway’ Unified Semantic Layer simplifies the process of connecting to data from a wide range of data sources and consuming that data in a wide range of SAP applications.

APOS Live Data Gateway – Benefits

Allan then showed the how the architecture of APOS Live Data Gateway makes this connection and consumption possible.

APOS Live Data Gateway – architecture

Allan briefly discussed the data sources supported by APOS Live Data Gateway. You can find out more about supported data sources here.

APOS Live Data Gateway – supported data sources

Allan described the key functions of the APOS Live Data Gateway Unified Semantic Layer views.

APOS Live Data Gateway – Unified Semantic Layer Views

Alan Golding provided a demonstration of how simple it is to create connections with APOS Live Data Gateway, and a second demonstration showing APOS Live Data Gateway’s performance with large data sets (over 1 billion records, in the demonstration).

APOS Live Data Gateway Demo – creating connections, performance

Allan Pym introduced the APOS Live Data Gateway Premium Edition, which has all of the functionality of the original product, plus the capabilities you need to connect SAP Analytics Cloud to your data in other SAP applications such as Ariba, SuccessFactors, Fieldglass and Concur. The Premium edition:

• Uses Live Mode with Caching
• Optimizes API data access and processing
• Aggregates multiple application sources
• Provides unified data connectivity

APOS Live Data Gateway – Premium Edition

The Premium edition includes an API Extraction Engine…

APOS Live Data Gateway Premium – API Extraction Engine

…and a Caching Repository…

APOS Live Data Gateway Premium – Caching Repository

…to create live data connections with caching for your SAP applications.

APOS Live Data Gateway Premium – Live data connections with Caching

Alan Golding demonstrated how this live data connectivity with caching works with SAP Ariba.

In summary, APOS Live Data Gateway provides:

APOS Live Data Gateway – Features

Learn more about APOS Live Data Gateway Premium.

You can view this webinar on demand here.