“An important part of SAP’s evolution toward this new strategy has been recognizing that no one vendor will own the entire customer stack,” he said. “That customer stack is very heterogeneous indeed.”
In the past, SAP and other vendors assumed that if they created a new product, customers would move their data to it — but this hasn’t always worked out well for vendors or customers.
Khan said SAP is no longer taking a hard line on moving data into its applications.
“If you’re running a marketing campaign, more than likely you’ll need access to SAP data,” he said. “But it makes it very easy to get access to the SAP context through the business data fabric via Datasphere, without needlessly moving the data, losing the context, losing the semantics, and then having to go over the painful exercise all over again.” reorganize from
New functions provided by Datasphere on the data warehouse cloud include automated data cataloging, simplified data replication, and improved data modeling.
The move from the 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. “If you don’t use it there’s nothing more to pay,” he said.