GCP – Analytics get smarter for SAP customers with Informatica and Google Cloud

Like many businesses around the world, SAP customers are adapting to new realities brought about not only by the current health crisis, but also by sudden competitive landscape shifts. As they pivot their business models and face major decisions, they need the ability to dig into massive amounts of data using analytics. 

But integrating enterprise data held in SAP applications with the myriad of non-SAP data types available—social, trends, geospatial, and more—is easier said than done. In fact, 52% of SAP customers say their top analytics pain point is data integration.¹ 

This is why Informatica and Google Cloud have partnered to help SAP customers better integrate and manage their data and gain new, powerful capabilities like world class analytics and AI at scale. 

How Informatica IICS and Google BigQuery work together 

With Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services (IICS), you can integrate data from any supported SAP system into Google Cloud’s BigQuery. BigQuery—a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse—provides SAP customers with big data capabilities on a serverless architecture designed for flexibility and speed. In contrast, traditional data warehouses require routine maintenance like monitoring, tuning, and provisioning, which can easily consume time, leaving limited time for analysis. 

In addition to integration, Informatica IICS can help assure data quality with holistic stewardship for all your data, regardless of its size, format, or platform, so you can profile, correct, and enrich data bound for BigQuery. Informatica’s metadata-driven visual design offers a single point of control for production data and gives you visibility into data flows across cloud and on-premises environments, so you can flag issues early. As a result, your teams can devote more time to analysis and insights. Customers can also take advantage of Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog (EDC) to scan and catalog data assets across the enterprise—from the cloud to on-premises. EDC is integrated with IICS allowing users to easily search, view and select data assets for integration from within IICS. This helps accelerate self-service integration and migration of data to GCP.

AI for everyone

With Informatica’s tight integration into Google Cloud, you can easily consolidate your enterprise data and take advantage of sophisticated AI capabilities, no matter what your organization’s level of expertise may be. BigQuery ML lets you build and run ML models using simple SQL commands—no complicated coding needed—as well as automating common ML tasks. In a 2019 study ESG found that organizations can reduce their overall data analytics costs by 52% compared to on premises solutions. Additionally ESG found that customers are able to process petabytes of data and get faster query results compared to on-prem alternatives.

In addition, by leveraging AutoML technology your data analysts can train high-quality custom machine learning models with minimal effort and machine learning expertise using your own data to build and deploy AI that’s exclusive to your organization. The AutoML products let your teams easily create custom models for vision, natural language, and translation. Or you can take advantage of Cloud AI Building Blocks to easily infuse AI into your existing SAP applications or build entirely new intelligent applications across a broad spectrum of use cases. These pre-trained APIs help you get started immediately with advanced capabilities for translation, vision, video intelligence, text-to-speech, speech-to-text, and more.

Imagine being able to finally integrate core SAP data like customer transactions with non-SAP data such as geospatial and social sentiment data, together with ML-driven recommendations, to drive entirely new insights and recommendations for your business. Or augmenting existing applications with AI/ML to engage customers in entirely new ways. 

Accelerate smart analytics for SAP

Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services (IICS) is available on Google Cloud Marketplace to help you transform your data into actionable information and better navigate a changing business landscape. To learn more about the partnership between Informatica and Google Cloud for SAP customers, watch our recent ASUG webinar, “Accelerating Smart Analytics for SAP: Integrating SAP and Google Cloud.” In it, you’ll learn how to integrate your business-relevant data with BigQuery, infuse AI into existing or new applications, and save costs by using BigQuery’s built-in machine learning capability.

Learn more about BigQuery on our website.

^{1. SAPInsider research, May 2020 Analytics Survey}