The Journey to SAP Data Intelligence: an innovation story from Fujitsu and SUSE

One of the great joys of my role is that I am often privy to the ‘inside story’ of how world-leading engineers and innovators develop the technologies that become so pivotal in our business world. One such story is that of Fujitsu and SUSE’s journey to co-create best-in-class solutions to support SAP Data Intelligence: an application that is becoming an essential tool for businesses seeking to capture, analyze and utilize the data they collate. As SAP developed this technology, Fujitsu and SUSE continued to innovate together, so that their customers can easily access and maximize the benefits of SAP’s data intelligence solutions.

So, what is SAP Data Intelligence?

SAP Data Intelligence is SAP’s comprehensive data orchestration and management solution that brings together multiple data sources. Users can simplify, analyze, process and leverage business data to develop actionable business insights at enterprise scale. Over the last five years, SAP Data Intelligence has developed to become a highly intelligent system that allows users to:

• Discover and connect to data anywhere, anytime from the cloud
• Transform and augment data across multiple data types
• Orchestrate complex data flows to implement intelligent data processes

Businesses can utilize these insights to stay ahead of the curve, predicting problems before they arise, meeting customer demands and to support their own innovation. As leaders in digitization, Fujitsu are committed to helping customers realize the benefits of digital transformation. Together with SUSE, they have innovated so that their customers are able to access and take advantage of these new technologies. Here’s their story:

Fujitsu and SUSE’s response to SAP Data Intelligence

Fujitsu and SUSE have both been global partners and co-innovators of SAP since 1999. For SUSE, the partnership of co-creation has developed so much so that SAP chose to build their recent SAP HANA on SUSE Linux. For Fujitsu, years of partnership with SAP has made them global experts in SAP solutions, with over 330,000 licenses in their responsibility and 3,500 SAP specialists employed globally. As a result, the two partners were perfectly placed to meet the demands of SAP’s newest tool for digital transformation.

Martin Werner from the Global Fujitsu SAP Competence Center explains how Fujitsu started to innovate with SAP’s new data application back in 2017 when it was named SAP DataOps, “In the beginning, it was more about getting access to external data sources from SAP. We had a lot of trial and error at that time which was very good to get experience with the whole core. But then as things developed, SAP realized we needed to gain more insights, and develop algorithms to find anomalies or correlations in the data. So, they built in artificial intelligence and renamed it SAP Data Intelligence so that both the data flow and intelligence is all managed within the platform.”

The team at Fujitsu immediately recognized the importance of this technology and innovated alongside SAP, to develop solutions that made it easy for their customers to utilize the benefits. It was clear that another co-creation with their long-time partners SUSE would be critical to their success.

Fujitsu Reference Architecture for SAP Data Intelligence

SAP Data Intelligence runs on Kubernetes which leverages open source and embeds machine learning capabilities. Fujitsu innovated with SUSE to create their Reference Architecture for SAP Data Intelligence on SUSE Open Source Software. It uses SUSE Rancher Kubernetes Management Platform, renowned for its simplicity and automation processes. As a result, Fujitsu’s reference architecture enables customer-specific SAP Data Intelligence system landscapes to be created, on an architecture that their customers can rely on.

When I caught up with Jens Adam, Global Sales Director Fujitsu Alliance at SUSE, he praised the way our experts have worked together over the last few years, “Fujitsu and SUSE have continued to innovate together, alongside SAP’s initiatives for data collection from edge to core. And the final product now is SAP Data Intelligence that customers can utilize to collect this data from all parts of the organization into one central repository and do meaningful things with it.”

Together, Fujitsu and SUSE have innovated to create a framework that supports new operating models whilst bringing data closer to the business, and easily coping with the complications that stem from that. With both a service that customers can rely on and technology that enriches the customers’ SAP ecosystems, Fujitsu and SUSE have simplified digital transformation and created a reliable and secure basis that will accelerate the success of their customers.

To find out more about Fujitsu’s Reference Architecture for SAP Data Intelligence you can download this whitepaper here.