GROW with SAP and Datasphere: SAP raises its profile in data management and cloud services

After the portfolio streamlining of recent months (sale of Qualtrics, withdrawal from the health and banking segments, and Business by Design), SAP has launched a new product initiative in the innovative areas of cloud and data. With Datasphere, SAP is finally addressing the integration challenge of heterogeneous data sources. GROW with SAP is the latest program to strengthen its cloud business.

Datasphere is based on SAP’s Data Warehouse Cloud and SAP Data Intelligence products and includes the familiar functions (e.g., SAP Connectivity, Marketplace, Analytics Cloud Integration). SAP has added functionalities for cloud-based data replication, semantic data modeling, and data governance. The new functionalities are automatically made available to all Data Warehouse Cloud customers.

Central to the Datasphere is the promise to combine all SAP and non-SAP data. It addresses demands from customers and service partners to simplify the complex use of data in the enterprise world by consolidating, cataloging, and storing data from different sources in one place. This is intended to meet the need for a holistic and integrated view of business operations.

To accompany this, SAP has announced strategic partnerships with data and AI companies Collibra, Confluent, Databricks, and DataRobot. The partnerships are designed to enable companies to build a unified data architecture that quickly delivers meaningful contextual business data with logic across data pools.

SAP has adopted a serious approach to the data issue with Datasphere. In the past, SAP’s commitment to developing integration solutions at the data level was neither successful nor sustainable, presumably because competitors such as IBM and Oracle had a strong footprint in this space. With SAP HANA Cloud and Datasphere, SAP now covers important building blocks in the data management space. Datasphere was welcomed by the SAP community, even though the concept of integrated data fabrics is not new and is already used by data integration providers such as Talend, IBM, Oracle, Tibco, and Qlik. In other words, SAP is late to the party.

The second important announcement was GROW with SAP. The similarity to RISE with SAP is no coincidence because the new approach pursues the same goal – making SAP a cloud company. GROW is more consistent in this claim and addresses a different clientele. While RISE is tailored to large, international corporations with SAP S/4HANA private cloud deployment models, GROW targets SAP S/4HANA public clouds (native SaaS) for large and midsize companies with annual revenues of between €200 million and €1 billion.

RISE also addresses existing customers that are about to migrate from SAP ECC (or older versions) to an SAP S/4HANA environment. GROW targets new customers and is therefore only implemented in a greenfield approach. Unlike RISE, the GROW package does not include any integration tools. Instead, GROW includes SAP modules such as SAP Build Process Automation to implement workflow management and robotic process automation (RPA).

Even though GROW is essentially a SaaS product that is easy to implement (SAP claims that a few weeks are enough for implementation), project durations of several months are probably more realistic. There is also the question of support from services partners. After all, they do better business with RISE and the move to the SAP S/4HANA Private Cloud, because these projects are more extensive and more demanding. Due to the small number of SAP S/4HANA public cloud implementations, when it comes to GROW, IT services providers need to build the necessary knowledge. Whoever does this the quickest will have a competitive advantage.

If GROW is to be a success, SAP must keep complexity at a minimum and integrate industry-specific scenarios and preconfigured process chains. As with RISE, SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) is part of the offering and is also important to enrich the highly standardized S/4HANA public cloud with customer-specific side-by-side extensions. In view of the target group and the capacity bottlenecks at the implementation partners, the success of GROW depends on whether companies’ process-related requirements can be met.