Germany software behemoth SAP has launched a new “Data Warehouse Cloud” – pushing into the territory of the hyperscalers and startups like Snowflake, which is capitalising on rapidly growing demand for cloud-based data warehouse software.
(A data warehouse is a centralised data repository. It typically brings together data from a range of sources and optimises it for analytics.)
SAP, which says more than 2,000 customers are registered for the beta program of the SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, and says general availability is planned for Q4, as part of a broader bundle of cloud-centric tools unveiled this week.
Describing it as a “self-service solution to easily and quickly tie all their [customers’] business data together and translate it into value for their specific line of business”, SAP said the data warehouse will have a “a simple and flexible pricing model”.
(Snowflake charges by use, per second, with no software licensing costs. It was not immediately clear precisely how SAP will charge).
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SAP said it can either be deployed either stand-alone or as an extension to customers’ existing on-premise SAP BW/4HANA solution or SAP HANA software.
The launch came as SAP said it will be offering its technology in a single stack with a single reference architecture spanning database and data management, application development and integration, analytics, intelligent technologies and “services to help organizations extend their SAP applications, integrate their landscape and build new applications to improve business processes.”
The launch appears to boil down to an effort to make the ERP specialist’s range of applications work together smoothly in the cloud – “as one set of interconnected services to store, process, govern and consume large volumes of data.”
This week’s launches comprises the data warehouse, along with SAP HANA Cloud “natively built for the cloud to bring customers the simplicity and speed of SAP HANA for all their data”; SAP Analytics Cloud as announced at SAP TechEd Las Vegas, and the4.3 release of the SAP BusinessObject business intelligence suite.
