Google Cloud and SAP in enterprise open data push

Google Cloud and SAP want to make it easier for enterprises to view their entire business data estates in real-time through the roll-out of a jointly created open data offering.

The two companies are long-standing technology collaborators, with Google Cloud specifically working with numerous enterprises to help migrate their on-premise SAP business application and data estates to its public cloud datacentres.

The pair are now turning their attention to enabling their joint enterprise customers to build an end-to-end data cloud, using SAP Datasphere to pull in data from across the business and marry it up with Google’s fully managed, serverless data warehouse to BigQuery so they can derive more value from it.

“Being able to easily combine SAP software data and non-SAP data on Google Cloud, from virtually any other data source, means organisations can dramatically accelerate their digital transformation with a fully defined data foundation that retains complete business context,” the companies said, in a statement.

It also means enterprises will be better prepared to put their data to use in artificial intelligence (AI)-related contexts, the companies added.

“Organisations spend significant resources building complex data integrations, custom analytics engines, and generative AI and natural language processing (NLP) models before they start to realise value from their data investments,” they said.

“Data originating from SAP systems, in particular, are among organisations’ most valuable assets, and can contain critical information on supply chains, financial forecasting, human resources records, omnichannel retail and more.”

Specifically, the SAP-Google Cloud offering will allow customers to access their business-critical data in real-time without risk of duplication, and aims to reduce incidents of data siloes existing in different lines of business.

By drawing on Google Cloud’s portfolio of AI and machine learning tools, enterprises will also be able to train models on data from SAP and non-SAP systems, the companies added.

“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,” said Christian Klein, CEO of SAP SE.

“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,” he said. “Our customers not only benefit from the business AI already built into our systems, but also from a unified data foundation.”

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said the expanded technology tie-up between the two companies will help enterprises realise their AI ambitions even more quickly.

“SAP and Google Cloud now offer an incredibly comprehensive and open data cloud, providing a foundation for the future of enterprise AI,” he said.

“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 utilise our analytics capabilities, as well as advanced AI tools and large language models to find new insights from their data.”