SAP Data Management Suite as a complex for working with Big Data in companies

This year at the SAPPHIRE NOW conference we showed a new set of solutions for working with big data - the SAP HANA Data Management Suite. Previously, many of our materials featured the name SAP Business Suite - today we will try to explain a little what Data Management Suite is and why it appeared at all in the SAP solution portfolio.

If earlier, when developing solutions for enterprise resource management, SAP focused on the implementation of standard business processes (this was how the Business Suite was created), now the focus has shifted to data management. This requires a special platform - powerful, functional, but also flexible and adaptable. To turn data into business decisions or analytics, you first need to put them in order. Usually, behind the word “big data” there is a large amount of diverse, inconsistent information coming from various sources and in colossal amounts.

SAP Data Management Suite is a tool that helps build data management in a corporation. But it is also a platform for corporate business applications that use these companies.
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SAP HANA is the core of the architecture. On the one hand, it is an analytical repository that allows you to provide access to all corporate data — including using multi-temperature data storage.

SAP HANA can also serve as a platform for creating business applications that work with corporate data. In this case, HANA provides you with the following functions:

• apps server
• decision lifecycle management tools
• text analysis tools
• opportunity to work with geo-data
• integrated mathematical functionality that is needed to create predictive and machine learning models
• IoT connectors

As a result, you get a set of tools to create your own innovative solution.



The concept of Data Management Suite was announced recently. But many of our clients around the world and in almost all sectors of the economy are already using the HANA platform to implement various scenarios. Here are some of them:

• SAP HANA as a high-performance database for SAP applications, which combines both transactional and analytical capabilities, in-memory calculations and significantly simplifies the solution architecture;
• SAP HANA as a database for solutions created by our partners (for example, Upstream Field Asset Management);
• Analytical data storage. For this, HANA has platform integration tools, fast processing of analytical requests in RAM, multi-temperature data storage capabilities;
• Applications for working with geo-data (for example, solutions for managing urban communications - water supply or sewage systems, as well as solutions for agricultural producers);
• To develop solutions using machine learning. The HANA platform has built-in predictive libraries, as well as opportunities for integrating the R programming language, using TensorFlow. Examples of such decisions: models of forecasting financial indicators, product quality management, forecasting equipment repairs;
• SAP HANA as a platform for developing IoT solutions. For example, in partnership with OSIsoft , connectors were developed that allow you to receive and process information from various sensors or sensors.

The second element of the architecture is SAP Data Hub. HANA is able to obtain data from different sources, but managing all corporate data — and this is a large array of information from different sources, including various production systems, Hadoop, third-party corporate data warehouses — requires a powerful industrial ETL solution.

SAP Data Hub is a complex in which all related tasks are concentrated: data extraction, processing, transformation, enrichment, data transfer to the “consumer” services. The service has a simple graphical interface for building data flows, which helps to manage complex infrastructure.

The main directions of using Data Hub:

• Scripts for the Internet of things. SAP Data Hub helps to process huge flows of information that come from sensors and are stored in distributed systems. It also allows you to build the processing of raw data, bringing them to a single format and levels of aggregation.
• Solutions using Machine Learning. In this case, we are always faced with a large amount of data, as a rule, stored in Hadoop. SAP Data Hub has tools for automating the process of calling and processing data from its repository.
• To build an integrated storage of big data, the architecture of which provides many data sources with different structure and speed

The next important element of the corporate data management platform is Big Data processing and storage. Developing solutions using big data requires not only systems for distributed storage of structured or unstructured data (we provide such PaaS solutions on the cloud-based SCP platform), but also to ensure the flow and processing of this data (SCP IoT services help here) .

Finally, for quick launch of new solutions for productive operation in SAP Data Management Suite there is a tool - Enterprise Architecture Designer. This is an application for the development of corporate IT architecture, which allows you to build optimal business processes and information systems architecture that satisfies the requirements of IT departments and businesses.

In the following articles we will talk about the individual solutions that are part of the complex SAP Data Management Suite.