Product Information
Extending SAP Analytics Cloud Live Connectivity to Non-SAP sources by leveraging SAP Data Warehouse Cloud capabilities
There are many scenarios out there, leveraging Non-SAP sources in SAP Analytics Cloud reporting. As part of our Analytics portfolio, SAP HANA with its smart data integration & smart data access capabilities is one of the popular solution options to connect the data to SAP Analytics Cloud.
In this blog post, I will show you how easy it is to leverage SAP Data Warehouse Cloud capabilities instead and what additional benefits you can gain out of it.
Current Challenges
There are two major challenges when it comes to the usage of SAP HANA with its federation capabilities:
- SAP HANA smart data integration & smart data access is not a direct cloud connection
Imagine you want to integrate existing cloud data in SAP Analytics Cloud, e.g. Odata services or some data in one of the big hyperscaler cloud environments. Even if you would not choose to use an On-premise SAP HANA, you would need to deploy a DataProvisioning Agent somewhere as well. In a lot of setups, this would lead to a dataflow like Cloud >> Onpremise >> Cloud, which is not the best approach - UX is not suited for data-savvy analysts
When choosing to use SAP HANA smart data integration & smart data access based approach, your users need to leverage the SAP HANA development workbench, which is targeted to real developers. It is not convenient for a data analyst to work in that environment
How does it work with SAP Data Warehouse Cloud?
For these scenarios we can leverage a set of services which are part of our SAP Data Warehouse Cloud offering.
Our SAP Data Warehouse Cloud offering comes with a big set of connectivity options – apart from our tight connection to SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW), SAP HANA and other SAP solutions, we have a broad range of options for Non-SAP datasources as well.
SAP Data Warehouse Cloud Non-SAP Connections
The federation enabled connections are of primary interest in our scenario. A list of all supported connections is available in our SAP Help.
While there are still some connections, leveraging Data Provisioning Agent in between, we offer a direct connection to many cloud services already and plan to extend this in future as well.
This is already tackling a major challenge mentioned above and provide a cloud ready, direct connection to other cloud services.
Providing a space for the end-user as playground for their own data integrations, a straight forward UX workflow and a great & seamless integration with SAP Analytics Cloud, enables your users to expand their usage.
To showcase the Ease of workflow, I just created a short walk-through in 3 minutes, connecting the famous Northwind OData service, creating a view & consuming it in SAP Analytics Cloud:
There are other examples on our Discovery Center as well, e.g. connecting to Amazon Athena, Google BigQuery or Azure Data Explorer.
Additional benefits
Leveraging SAP Data Warehouse Cloud as a thin layer between SAP Analytics Cloud and your datasource, gives a lot of flexibility when the usecase matures.
You can easily extend the usecases by our unique SAP Data Warehouse Cloud capabilities like extended modeling, dataflows, data access restrictions, cataloging, data marketplace, intelligent lookup,…
Example:
If you recognize that you are experiencing performance challenges, because you are fishing around in your big data lake, you can easily take snapshots of what is of interest for your dashboards and gain high-speed access to it.
Summary
Everything you have seen in this blog is already available today and you can easily start playing around e.g. with a SAP Data Warehouse Cloud trial
Apart from what is working today, you can expect the integration between our SAP Analytics Cloud & SAP Data Warehouse Cloud offering to become even more integrated in the near future.
That way you can easily expand the connectivity of SAP Analytics Cloud & use the full power of our Unified Data & Analytics portfolio.
Many thanks for your interest in the topic and I hope you like it. Please share your feedback in the comments and let me know if you have any questions. If you want to read more blogs on the interplay of SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Data Warehouse Cloud in the future, make sure to follow me.
Stay safe,
Tobias
A great customer example for it - just recently released blog post.
Check out how Decathlon uses both offerings to expand their SAC usage here.
BR,
TM
Where is Apache/Kafka connector? Any IoT streaming solution?
Hi Adi,
SAP Data Warehouse Cloud offers a lot of connectors already for structured data. When it comes to IoT streaming etc. we do have our SAP Data Intelligence offering as part of our Unified Data&Analytics Platform.
The integration of SAP Data Intelligence and SAP Data Warehouse Cloud already takes place - Dataflows in SAP Data Warehouse Cloud are SAP Data Intelligence capabilities. This integration will get stronger in the near future, to make it even more easy to leverage our platform for these kind of usecases.
BR,
TM
Tobias
thank you for your answer, but this was known.
our challenge is that the solution becomes the best of breed composed from multiple SAP offerings, which makes almost impossible to present the benefits to the client.
competing solutions might be simpler and more cost effective.
also there is a challenge even to run a simple POC for end to end processes because this will require 3-5 solutions to be involved.
for us SAP partners this creates some integration work but for SAP this might be a disaster for a long term once clients will walk away to simplistic competitive solutions elsewhere
cheers
Adi
Hi Adi,
thank you for your honest feedback.
There will always be other solutions which might make specific workflows like connecting and analysing streaming data easier than others.
While there are enough other reasons to count on SAP Analytics Cloud's core capabilities & strengths, we believe that our solutions makes most sense and provides the broadest usecase options, when combined.
This is why it is so important for us to deliver on a Unified Data & Analytics platform, which makes it easy to pick what you need in terms of capabilities to fulfil your usecases. As i stated there is more to come so stay tuned!
BR,
TM
Great blog... But this is more about consuming non-sap data for consumption and analysis in Analytics cloud through cloud Datawarehouse, right?
What about we want to distribute data from cloud Datawarehouse to non-sap data lakes?
For e.g.: to Azure data lake.
The most practical solution is to use cloud Datawarehouse, consume it in Analytics cloud and at the same time cloud Datawarehouse distribute the data to Azure. Right?
Its a great video and explanation, I am wondering if there is some blog where i can learn how to persist the data from Northwind into SAP DWC tables and delta merge will keep running on it in a time interval automatically?