Today, SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) and Google Cloud announced an extensive expansion of their partnership, introducing a comprehensive open data offering designed to simplify data landscapes and unleash the power of business data. This offering enables customers to build an end-to-end data cloud that brings data from across the enterprise landscape using the SAP® Datasphere solution together with Google’s data cloud, so businesses can view their entire data estates in real-time and maximize value from their Google Cloud and SAP software investments.
Data is the cornerstone of digital transformation and artificial intelligence (AI) development. Organizations spend significant resources building complex data integrations, custom analytics engines, and generative AI and natural language processing (NLP) models before they start to realize value from their data investments. Data originating from SAP systems, in particular, are among organizations’ most valuable assets and can contain critical information on supply chains, financial forecasting, human resources records, omnichannel retail, and more. SAP Datasphere combines this mission-critical data with data from across the enterprise landscape, regardless of its origin. The ability to easily combine SAP software data and non-SAP data on Google Cloud, from virtually any other data source, means organizations can dramatically accelerate their digital transformation with a fully defined data foundation that retains complete business context.
Christian Klein, CEO and member of the Executive Board of SAP SE, said: “Bringing together SAP systems and data with Google’s data cloud introduces entirely new opportunities for enterprises to derive more value from their full data footprints. SAP and Google Cloud share a commitment to open data and our extended partnership will help break down barriers between data stored in disparate systems, databases, and environments. Our customers not only benefit from the business AI already built into our systems, but also from a unified data foundation.”
Thomas Kurian, CEO, Google Cloud, said: “SAP and Google Cloud now offer an incredibly comprehensive and open data cloud, providing a foundation for the future of enterprise AI. Few resources are as important to digital transformation as data. By deeply integrating SAP data and systems with our data cloud, customers will be able to utilize our analytics capabilities, as well as advanced AI tools and large language models to find new insights from their data.”
Enterprises in Southeast Asia, such as Blue Bird Group, JB Cocoa, Kopi Kenangan, Link Net, NTUC Enterprise, Ocean Network Express, Siam Cement Group, and Vingroup, just to name a few, have been leveraging Google Cloud and SAP’s joint offerings to help them run their businesses more intelligently and sustainably, and achieve impactful results.
Yeo Yean Mei, Group Project and IT Manager, JB Cocoa, said: “SAP on Google Cloud centralizes our business processes, from sales to logistics, and incorporates internal and external data for greater traceability and financial transparency. Our use of Google Cloud powered by renewable energy will enable us to meet our environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals and, more broadly, contribute to our customers’ emission reduction targets. With SAP on Google Cloud, we can automate complex intercompany transactions with a customized pricing engine to track commodity price fixing and forex hedging. We can analyze the changing risk exposure and position on a daily basis with real-time data. Our goal is to build a centralized production dashboard to perform more analytics directly on Google Cloud in the future, combining data sources from [our] Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) and SAP systems.”
Zeng Fengping, Chief Technology Officer, Kopi Kenangan, said: “The combination of SAP and Google Cloud is a no-brainer. The cloud model brings a lot of advantages. It is an agile way to scale the business and an easy way to optimize operational costs. It also provides better service availability. RISE with SAP enables us to enjoy all the benefits of Google Cloud without the extra effort. Together, they serve one offering, which makes it an easy decision for us. It simplifies all efforts regarding running and maintaining SAP, and it also gives us the same level of service quality and data privacy protection that we can get in a traditional implementation.”
Alan Sze, Deputy General Manager, BPIT, Ocean Network Express, said: “One advantage of running SAP on Google Cloud is the business continuity on a highly available platform. Google Cloud provides failover between sites so we can keep accounting tasks running even if a disaster occurs. This enables us to continue our operations without compromising on service quality to our customers. The flexibility and scalability of Google Cloud made our upgrade easy – not to mention the reduction of operational costs and also the reduction of CO2 emissions, which is in line with our corporate sustainability policy. We are in the midst of building our BigQuery cloud data warehouse and using Looker as our new business intelligence (BI) tool. We are also planning to build our data lake in BigQuery, so that we can have the data analytics capability to achieve operational excellence and provide a better customer experience.”
SAP and Google Cloud’s new open data offering complements the RISE with SAP solution and will enable customers to:
-
Access business-critical data in real-time: The integration between SAP Datasphere and Google Cloud BigQuery allows customers to easily access their most critical data in real-time without data duplication. This joint offering can unify data from SAP software systems, such as SAP S/4HANA® and SAP HANA® Cloud, providing organizations with a comprehensive view of their most important data on Google’s data cloud.
-
Simplify data landscapes: SAP and Google Cloud have co-engineered powerful data replication and federation technologies, which allow businesses to easily integrate SAP software data with BigQuery environments and leverage SAP and Google Cloud’s leading data analytics capabilities. Now, customers can federate queries across SAP Datasphere and BigQuery to blend data from SAP and non-SAP software. This eliminates common data silos from sources that span marketing, sales, finance, supply chain, and more. For example, customers with wholesale business distribution models can now have full visibility into their products as they go through the sales pipeline and reach customers.
-
Create trusted insights with Google Cloud’s advanced AI and machine learning (ML) models: Businesses will be able to use Google Cloud’s AI and ML services to train models on data from SAP and non-SAP systems.
-
Perform advanced analysis: Organizations can utilize the analytics capabilities of the SAP Analytics Cloud solution in Google Cloud to analyze financial and business outcomes while improving the accuracy of models. With a simple integration to data in BigQuery with SAP Datasphere, customers can plan with a single, comprehensive view of their businesses.
-
Utilize joint solutions for sustainability: SAP and Google Cloud are exploring ways to combine SAP Datasphere with broader ESG data sets and insights powered by Google Cloud to accelerate sustainability journeys with actionable insights.
-
Use SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) on Google Cloud globally: SAP will advance its multi-cloud offerings by expanding regional support of SAP BTP and SAP HANA Cloud on Google Cloud, which includes support for SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Datasphere. SAP and Google Cloud intend to launch SAP BTP in five new regions this year, building to a total of eight regions supported by 2025.
The companies also plan to partner on joint go-to-market initiatives for enterprises’ largest data projects, enabling customers to adopt data products from both SAP and Google Cloud.
Visitors to the SAP Sapphire® conference can see demos of joint AI and data solutions at Google Cloud’s booth. These include how enterprises can apply generative AI to common workflows and applications, such as using a chatbot to search, create, and edit purchase requests. The SAP Sapphire conference takes place on May 16 and 17 virtually and in Orlando, Florida.
