Kathy Gibson reports from SAPInsider in Vienna – As businesses shift to digitalisation, data has a more important role to play than ever.
Today, business decisions are being made on the fly, and these are often automated and based on data that is assumed to be accurate.
“You really have to make sure the data is good,” says Chris Hallenbeck, senior vice-president: database and data management: EMEA at SAP.
“Because a lot of the data quality issues happen as you move the data from ERP into analytics, organisations really do need to have enterprise information management (EIM), in realtime.
“All the data needs to be clean, and there is a security element that needs to be considered as well.”
Data governance is of vital importance when companies are making instantaneous decision, says Jayne Landry, global vice-president and GM at SAP Business Intelligence.
“We are seeing a big move in analytics towards more agile data preparation, where IT is delivering analytics to users.
“In this scenario, governance is vital. You can let the users do the data matching themselves, but IT has to manage the data governance.”
SAP today launched new EIM solutions that better support both big data and cloud as well as more self-service capabilities with better governance.
The new products include new versions of SAP HANA smart data integration, SAP HANA smart data quality, SAP Data Services and SAP Information Steward software, and the SAP Agile Data Preparation application.
“In a digital business, the speed of decisions is instantaneous, as everything and everyone is connected live,” says Barbara Stortz, senior vice-president: SAP HANA Enterprise Information Management at SAP.
“This means that every organisation needs realtime access to data that can be trusted, and to have the flexibility to prepare for the unique needs of every department and user. To help our customers achieve information excellence, SAP continues to innovate and invest in our EIM portfolio to offer customers a foundation for a digital business.”
Existing technologies lack the capabilities that allow organisations to easily gain access to and govern big data and to make use of cloud platforms for information storage and cost reduction.
The latest releases of SAP HANA smart data integration and SAP HANA smart data quality enable business users to mash-up data from social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+ with their enterprise information sources to gain new and more comprehensive insights about customer behavior, product lifecycles and market conditions.
The new release of SAP Data Services has enhanced features to enable customers to migrate their on-premise data of any format in any size to cloud services such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon S3, and Google Cloud Storage. As a result, users can perform big data analytics and support disaster recovery by backing up data in the cloud, and they can access their data from anywhere using any application.
In support of big data environments, enterprises can now read and load data from HPE Vertica and process Microsoft Outlook data files to gain insights from messages, calendar events and archived items.
The new version of SAP Information Steward gives users the ability to view data lineage and impact analysis for Hadoop data sources, delivering confidence in decision making since the data origin is transparent.
SAP Agile Data Preparation is an intuitive, business-user-oriented, interactive tool empowers business users specifically with self-service capabilities to access, transform and combine data to reduce the time and complexity of preparing their data for analysis.
Meanwhile, the latest release of SAP Agile Data Preparation contains enhancements to help users quickly analyse and monitor data quality with the ability to define data domains and set up scorecards.
To help companies improve the way they govern their data, the latest release of SAP Information Steward offers the ability to easily monitor compliance with information policies defined in the tool. Users receive notifications of and can take immediate action to remedy data quality issues.
