SAP has, without a doubt, revolutionized how businesses deploy technology as a driver of value. From its early days of being a solid provider of ERP technology for some of the world’s largest businesses, SAP today offers a broad spectrum of core business solutions that accelerate digital transformation across a range of functions. SAP’s suite of digital solutions covers functions as intrinsic as employee payroll to complex supply chain and logistics management of multinational manufacturers. If we look at figures, 99 of the world’s top 100 organizations have SAP as a major part of their technology strategy.
Over the years SAP has diversified from its core ERP platform offerings into a full-fledged end-to-end enterprise digital transformation solution-set that caters to a large customer base with technologies running across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid modes of infrastructure. As SAP’s solutions have evolved, the enterprise tech ecosystem has developed too. Today, it’s a complex mix of special-purpose tools and technologies, each performing crucial tasks.
Today, a business may rely on SAP ERP for some of its core operations management but may also depend on several other 3rd party provider solutions that help in creating a robust digital ecosystem that helps them manage end-to-end operations. The challenge here is that data from across different SAP platforms must be combined with data from other business systems to ensure that the business gets the most accurate analytical and actionable insights from the data residing across its operational landscape. Even the gamut of information from SAP systems alone may be distributed across departments or functional units. A significant effort is called for to harmonize and unify this data.
This is a scenario where Snowflake can step in with a powerful solution.
Snowflake offers a cloud-based data-warehousing platform that allows businesses to manage their large data loads efficiently with intelligent automation and on-demand scale. The cloud data warehousing market is estimated to be worth over USD 10.42 billion by 2026 and Snowflake is a global leader in this space. Snowflake brings in a trusted set of offerings that allows businesses to engineer innovative data experiences and build resilient data management and sharing models. These models fuel high-end applications which ultimately accelerate digital transformation.
Snowflake brings data engineering, warehousing, innovation, data science modeling, and sharing in one place. It allows organizations to plug in any number of data sources and unravel meaningful and analytical behaviors from them. Snowflake supports a wide variety of data formats, offers tailored connectors that seamlessly liaise with popular business systems, and offers easier loading of data automatically.
The challenge with data and information overload of an organization when multiple SAP and other vendor business systems are involved can be rectified by integrating SAP with Snowflake. Let us explore the key benefits that organizations can enjoy when they integrate SAP with Snowflake:
- Simplify data architecture: Snowflake’s support for accommodating data in a wide range of formats allows easier modeling of analytical processes. The data architecture for the business can be simplified even if SAP systems offer a combination of structured and unstructured data sets. By autonomously managing storage capacity or performance enhancement, and statistical modeling, Snowflake ensures that the business always gets a simplified 360-degree view of the important elements from their large data stores.
- Enhance security: Snowflake offers enterprise-grade encryption as a standard part of the platform. It assures an extra layer of security by encrypting data both in storage as well as in transit and it only shares an insights view of the data to different users requesting insights. It does not grant them access to the data storage without approved credentials. Thus, integrating your SAP data into Snowflake brings more safety for the data managed within SAP systems as they are secluded and isolated from fraudulent tampering or access.
- Scale workload management elastically: Snowflake delivers tremendous flexibility in how businesses can plug in their computational services to derive insights from the data store. By isolating storage from the computational layer, Snowflake allows different stakeholders to conveniently scale computing or storage with SAP data according to their respective workloads. Being a cloud platform, the benefits of on-demand scalability are always available for businesses to leverage.
- Better utilization of SAP data: In the traditional analytical setup, a large chunk of SAP data may be lying unutilized within the enterprise as it has no meaning by itself. But when integrated with Snowflake, there is an opportunity for different SAP users to combine their data securely and flexibly with data from other business systems. Combined, there would be better contextual importance for data within SAP systems and this is a win-win situation for all stakeholders.
While in the past SAP or any technology provider erected boundaries in their software to keep customers from turning to other 3rd party vendors, the massive onslaught of the digital economy has broken down these boundaries. Today, every major technology provider builds digital platforms and solutions that are highly interoperable with other and even competing vendor offerings.
Rather than building every known digital capability on its own, technology companies realized the power of leveraging connected experiences driven by proven offerings. Enterprises can thus confidently move ahead with their digital ambitions by bringing together massive loads of data from across their transactional business systems like SAP. Using platforms like Snowflake, businesses can truly uncover hidden value within their data ecosystem. Get in touch with us to know more about integrating your SAP business data with Snowflake for a better and smarter future.