Managing All That Valuable SAP Data

Business leaders have been leveraging business data for continued growth and competitiveness for decades. At first, the focus was on understanding markets and competitors to make major strategic decisions about a company’s future direction. However, as technology made it possible to collect more and broader types of data, line of business staff could use it to make the tactical decisions that drive day-to-day operations more efficiently. With timely access to the right data, businesses can identify new markets and understand how to offer customers products, services, and support in a way that makes them highly competitive. Internal operations can run more efficiently when each person has the information needed to consistently get the best possible outcome that saves time and money.

SAP’s “Intelligent Enterprise” strategy and solutions help organizations transform their operations to meet the changing business needs. It can combine customer sentiment and operational data in real-time so that business leaders can understand how to improve product offerings, services, and customer experience. It helps analyze data to anticipate new requirements, and rapidly deliver new products and services to keep existing customers happy while attracting new business. It also provides the flexibility to take advantage of technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and Internet-of-Things (IoT) for even greater insight into business operations and processes to get the benefits of automation, predictive analysis, and improved efficiency.

All that data is great but the challenge, of course, is how to collect and manage the sheer volume as well as the number and variety of different sources. That’s where SAP Data Intelligence can help. It’s a data orchestration solution that discovers and manages any type of data across distributed landscapes through a single pane of glass. A unique aspect of SAP Data Intelligence is that SAP initially designed and now delivers it as a containerized solution managed with Kubernetes. This approach gives SAP customers the benefits of availability, portability, and the ability to scale the solution as needed. The goal is to rapidly deliver a single source of trusted data (sometimes referred to as “a single version of the truth”) to the right users with the right context at the right time.

Following a long tradition of co-innovation with SUSE, SAP chose to develop and deliver SAP Data Intelligence first with SUSE CaaS Platform as its Kubernetes container management solution. SUSE CaaS Platform helps IT and DevOps staff to more easily deploy, manage, and scale container-based applications and services like SAP Data Intelligence while also automating the tasks of building, managing, and upgrading Kubernetes clusters themselves. It also combines the benefits of an enterprise-ready operating system with the agility of an orchestration platform for containerized applications. SUSE CaaS Platform is easy to install and configure while simplifying container management with Kubernetes so that IT staff can spend more time delivering data services that benefit the business rather than maintaining the infrastructure.

SUSE CaaS Platform 4.2 is now validated for managing SAP Data Intelligence 3.0 patch 4 and above with SUSE Enterprise Storage providing a storage backend. Be sure to check out Ulrich Schairer’s blog to get the details including links to SAP Notes and installation instructions. SUSE understands that SAP customers prefer to keep their infrastructures as stable and consistent as possible while getting the advantages of recent open-source innovations. SUSE CaaS Platform 4.2 provides an extended support option that ensures customers can advance their Kubernetes infrastructure aligned with SAP Data Intelligence requirements. Customers are encouraged to contact their SUSE, reseller, or integrator sales reps to learn more about this new option.