SAP Data Integration: Speed Time to Value with Informatica and Google Cloud Cortex Framework

Capitalize on Intelligent Connectivity and Prebuilt Connectors

At Informatica, we believe data is the soul of business transformation. We also believe that data analytics is crucial to successful business outcomes. Recent research indicates that analytics has emerged from the pandemic as the top game-changing technology.

SAP customers are a case in point. To maximize the value of their investments and drive better decision-making, they need comprehensive visibility into all their enterprise data. They also need to be able to look at their SAP data in the context of data from their other hybrid and multi-cloud enterprise applications and data sources. But extracting data from SAP systems, ingesting it into a modern, scalable data analytics platform, and combining it with multiple first-party and third-party data sources to drive new insights can be complex and challenging.

Google Cloud Cortex Framework is designed to address these challenges. It provides a foundation of endorsed solution reference templates and content for customers to accelerate business outcomes with less risk, complexity and cost.

As a strategic Google Cloud partner for data analytics and analytics platform modernization, we are very pleased to be a launch partner for Cortex. Informatica accelerates the implementation of Google Cloud Cortex Framework Data Foundation, enabling customers to drive value for their organizations by deploying and leveraging solutions like Google Cloud BigQuery for modern, scalable cloud data warehousing.

Delivering Robust and Proven Connectivity for SAP Integration

Well over 1,000 SAP data customers currently rely on Informatica’s robust and proven SAP connectivity for data integration. In addition, our Enterprise Data Catalog enhances the ability to find and classify data wherever it is, across SAP and non-SAP systems. The solution provides comprehensive data discovery, end-to-end data lineage and insights into connections to other data sets.

Lastly, our data quality capabilities profile and cleanse data before it is integrated into BigQuery, ensuring customer trust in fit-for-use data and significantly boosting the outcomes of analytics project. These capabilities and more are now available through Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services on the Google Cloud Marketplace.

When it comes to extracting data from core SAP ERP systems, writing integration scripts is time consuming and requires specialized technical training. Complexity is magnified for organizations that run multiple SAP instances and versions.

Informatica offers multiple, easy-to-use connectors to extract data without the need to write code or possess deep SAP knowledge. You can extract the data in batch, micro batch, or near real-time, depending upon your use cases. Informatica has a strong presence in cloud and on-premises data management, making it one of the best tools for your data projects.

ABAP Table Reader is one of the most versatile connectors, giving a relational interface to all SAP tables and views. You can join and filter them just like any other relational database while connecting to the application layer; our customers move trillions of records using this interface daily.

ABAP Delta Reader is an add-on module on top of the ABAP Table Reader that captures the deltas or changes based on the SAP Change Documents. Given that many SAP base tables do not track the timestamps, this functionality comes in handy to pull changes into data warehouses and data lakes.

SAP IDoc listener can extract data in near real-time for the most time sensitive data elements. Informatica can be used both as an ETL and ELT tool based on the use case at hand.

Informatica also has many other connectors like BAPI/RFC, ODP, OData, BEx Query and BW Connector to meet all your extended needs. In the case of SAP CDC support for GCP, SAP HANA extract changes can use database triggers. These solutions require an SAP Enterprise license for the HANA Database.

Any developer with integration skills can make SAP a source and extract any data from SAP. Using prebuilt connectors saves a significant amount of time compared with writing custom integration scripts. Informatica offers prebuilt connectors for more than 200 data sources, both on-premises and in the cloud. Intelligent connectivity learns the schema and structure of the data, whether in flat file, relational or hierarchical format. Connectors infer schema, types and the domain of the data and can accommodate schema changes from one data transfer session to the next. When combined with BigQuery’s massive scalability, customers can intermingle data from nearly any source with their SAP operational data for analysis and machine learning.

Next Steps

Informatica has been an SAP partner and industry leader for more than 25 years and is certified by SAP for integrations with ECC, BW, S/4 HANA, HANA Database and NetWeaver-based applications. We are excited and proud to be a launch partner for Google Cloud Cortex Framework, building upon our initial 2019 partnership with expanded integrations and the availability of Informatica solutions on the Google Cloud Marketplace.