Datasphere Unlocks the Data-Driven Enigma

Datasphere is a revolutionary new approach to becoming an intelligent data-driven firm.

For more than three decades, companies have been in pursuit of becoming truly data-driven. After decades of effort and investment, less than 30% of Fortune 500 C-Suite executives believe that their own firm is data-driven, as measured by the NewVantage Partners survey published in the Harvard Business Review. 

The goal remains pure and valid. When you have the right insights delivered to the right person at the right time, decisions become easier, quicker, and better. The right decisions result in:

1. 1. happier customers,
   2. lower costs,
   3. market share growth,
   4. earnings growth, and
   5. overall improved health of companies. 

So what has gone wrong? Billions have been spent to date. Why does the enterprise systems industry find itself in this situation? A great question to ask is how did we get here in the first place.

A business is the sum of its business processes, which leverage people, assets, and technology. The Information Technology team (I.T.) has supported the processes with applications, each application producing transactional data. In order to create first-generation decision support systems, we moved and transformed that data into relational Enterprise Data Warehouses (EDW), but that model was I.T. labor intensive, I.T. centric, and inevitably inflexible. 

Line-of-business departments then demanded greater flexibility, extracting data from EDWs into departmental agile data marts, and then extracted subsets into individual spreadsheets. The sprawl resulted in poor governance, rampant duplication and transformation of data, excessive movement, and lack of data quality. Recently, new second-generation cloud offerings promised to improve the situation but these solutions repeated many of the same mistakes, with data analytics ultimately landing far away, disconnected from the business processes that run the daily business.   

SAP re-evaluated the situation and decided to take a new fresh approach that finally delivers the analytical insights that have often been elusive. The key idea is to not disconnect the data and move it far from the business processes that are the foundational core of any business.

Datasphere, introduced in 2023 as part of SAP Business Technology Platform, is designed to:

• • Offer live connections to data sources, dramatically reducing movement, duplication, and latency,
  • Combine SAP ‘system of record’ data — with business meaning and context automatically retained — with all relevant structured and unstructured “big” data from the business,
  • Support streaming of real-time data in and out of Datasphere to meet today’s fast-moving expectations.
  • Enable simpler application of machine learning and artificial intelligence to the insights challenge, and
  • Deliver insights within the business processes where most associates spend their day.

SAP Datasphere combines the best of SAP technologies with components from key partners Google, Collibra, Confluent, Data Bricks, and Data Robot, delivering an easy to use, adaptable data fabric that delivers insights where they are needed in a timely manner. 

Schedule a meeting with your SAP team to discover how BTP and Datasphere can revolutionize your approach and help your company become intelligent and data-driven. If you are not sure who to contact, connect on LinkedIn and I can help.

Additional information well worth checking out:

1. 1. SAP Datasphere Community, great for blogs, how to, and Q&A.
   2. Discovery center, Datasphere missions. Valuable for I.T. professionals.
   3. Help is always available and found at help.sap.com.

Regards,

Bob Sakalas