SAP rebranded its data management portfolio and announced new partnerships with leading data and artificial intelligence (AI) companies to help customers more easily integrate and access SAP software data and third-party data to make more informed business decisions.

“We call the cost in both time and expense of data and management and analytics ‘the hidden data tax’ because the current approach, which requires companies to rebuild the business context of SAP and non-SAP data using brittle or expensive integration tools, is only adding complexity to their already complex data landscape,” Julia White, Chief Marketing and Solutions Officer at SAP, said during a press conference.

To reduce this “hidden tax,” the German software giant rebranded its Data Warehouse Cloud solution to Datasphere and added new functionalities including automated data cataloging that discovers, manages, and governs data; streamlined data replication that ensures real-time delivery of data and constant updates; and improved data modeling that captures the rich business context of data in its applications. Additionally, the vendor plans to add further application integration capabilities that connect data and metadata from its cloud solutions to Datasphere.

No additional steps or migrations are required for existing Data Warehouse Cloud customers.

“We have kept all the powerful capabilities of SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, like symmetric modeling and data virtualization. And we have added new data cataloging and data ingestion features that are available today,” CTO Jürgen Müller said.

It is "the only multi-cloud service that provides a unified experience for data integration, data cataloging, semantic modeling, data warehousing, data federation, and data virtualization to enable every data professional to easily distribute business data with business context and logic preserved,” he added.

The new portfolio is built on the SAP Business Technology Platform that offers database and data management, application development and integration, analytics, and intelligent technologies.

“SAP Datasphere is the hub for accessing authoritative data no matter where it resides," Müller touted. "We are empowering organizations with an intentional route to enrich all data projects across SAP applications, across non-SAP applications with business ready contextual data, no extraction or rebuilding of content is needed."

To further simplify customers’ data landscape, SAP announced its first set of strategic data and AI partners, including Collibra NV, Confluent, Databricks, and DataRobot.

“Now these leading data vendors will closely integrate their data and AI platforms into SAP. And together, we're going to enable customers to combine SAP data with other sources,” White said.

For example, DataRobot customers can use its machine learning (ML) capabilities and bring Datasphere to their business data fabric on whichever cloud platform it resides. And joint customers can integrate Databricks’ Data Lakehouse with SAP software so data can be shared with semantics preserved.

“Imagine being able to manage and combine all of your SAP data with Salesforce or ServiceNow data stored in external cloud systems. That's an absolute game changer when it comes to unleashing data across the company's most important vendors and business processes,” White added.