SAP rounds out data warehouse cloud functionality, renamed Datasphere

“A significant part of SAP’s evolution towards this new strategy is recognizing that no single vendor will own the entire customer stack,” he said. “That customer stack is in fact very heterogeneous.”

In the past, SAP and other vendors have assumed that if they create a new product, customers will move their data to it — but that has not always worked out well for either vendors or customers.

SAP is no longer taking a hard line on moving data to its applications, Khan said.

“If you’re running a marketing campaign, more likely you’ll need to have access to SAP data,” he said. “But it just makes it a lot easier to have access to the SAP context through the business data fabric, through Datasphere, without having to redundantly move the data, lose the context, lose semantics, and then have to go to the painful exercise of having to reconstitute all that again.”

The new functions Datasphere offers over Data Warehouse Cloud include automated data cataloging, simplified data replication, and improved data modeling.

The move from Data Warehouse Cloud to Datasphere will be easy, according to Khan: Existing customers will automatically have access to the new functionality and will be charged for usage under their regular SAP consumption agreement. “There’s nothing more to pay if you don’t use it,” he said.