LAS VEGAS – SAP is hoping it can make sense of billions of terabytes of data that is being collected by enterprises but not managed or analyzed. The software company debuted SAP Data Hub at an event in New York that was simulcast here at the SAP TechEd 2017 conference.
Greg McStraveick, president of SAP data base and data management, said that only one-half of 1 percent of data that is collected is ever analyzed. “Most data is unused and is rapidly unmanageable,” he said. “It’s not slowing down. The sources of data are growing exponentially.”
The company’s Data Hub helps enterprises extract data from various parts of the organization, regardless of whether it is in the cloud, on premise, or in a hybrid environment. It also is compatible with both SAP and non-SAP systems, including Apache Hadoop. The Data Hub will allow companies to interconnect their data, understand their data, and predict emerging data threats, SAP said.
SAP executives emphasized that the Data Hub doesn’t move data around, nor does it make copies of the data. Instead it leaves the data where it resides and allows enterprises to unify their data by pushing the compute aspect to where the data resides.
Adam Fecadu, chief information architect with McKesson, praised Data Hub for its elimination of duplicate data. “Closing the gap and eliminating the duplication will help a lot,” he said. “We’ve been looking in the industry for that.”
Data Hub is built as an application in SAP’s HANA platform but uses the SAP Vora runtime processing engine. Vora is using the Kubernetes container management platform.
In a press briefing after the videocast, Michael Eacrett, VP of product management, EIM and Big Data at SAP, compared Data Hub to being the air traffic control for data. “We don’t want to pull data to a central place, just like air traffic control doesn’t bring every plane to one place,” he said.
SAP CEO Bill McDermott touts the company’s new Data Hub product during a video presentation at the SAP TechEd 2017 conference.