Google Cloud Cortex Framework Data Foundation for SAP and Why It Matters

If you didn’t spend much time absorbed in Google Cloud Next 21 content last week, you may have missed an interesting announcement reaffirming the partnership that SAP and Google Cloud have been cementing over the last three years and recently expanded it with their latest announcement.

The primary goal of this partnership is to help SAP customers accelerate transformation through a jointly developed and tuned hardware stack, industry-leading security and availability features, a differentiated cloud data and analytics platform with Google BigQuery at its core, and VertexAI helping to drive transformation. 

What was announced? 

Google announced its Google Cloud Cortex, a framework made up of foundational reference tools, architectures and Data mart templates meant to help SAP customers rapidly unlock value from SAP workloads with lower costs, regardless of whether the workloads are on-premises or cloud.

What does it mean for SAP customers? 

In this first release, Google has packaged these accelerators into three distinct buckets: reference architectures, deployment accelerators and integration services. Each of these have foundational components that will help you combine your locked SAP data with other third-party data sources to develop new insights and accelerate your time to value.

To simplify and standardize framework connectors between SAP and Google Cloud, certified technology partners like Qlik with their “Qlik Replicate” product will also be introduced in the coming months. They have also announced critical BigQuery operational Data marts and change data capture (CDC) processing, which will streamline and speed up data integrations from existing SAP application data structures. Additionally, in this first release, BigQuery ML templates can be used to drive product prediction for segmented customers, with more to come. Google is also including pre-built dashboard visualization templates from Looker. 

With Google Cloud Cortex, Google is laying down all the foundational components and initial use cases to support an accelerated time to value for SAP customers. We know that many SAP customers are looking for ways to accelerate their ability to combine and analyze data from different data sources, both in house and externally. Google has provided an interesting approach to support specific Data mart mappings for SAP’s central applications and includes timely use cases like demand shaping as a starting point for customers. And even more exciting? Pythian can help with this, too.

How does Pythian help SAP customers drive new insights and transformation leveraging Google Cloud?  

At Pythian, we have been helping customers combine data from systems of record, like SAP with third-party data, for years. We have helped our customers drive SAP transformations on Google Cloud with an opinionated approach, defining new methods that support existing pressures on the enterprise for a new type of data estate, a Cloud Enterprise Data Platform.

Google Cloud Cortex provides a set of foundational components that will help our customers move faster, with better alignment to SAP’s existing data organization and structures. It will also get better over time, with a mix of expanded use cases. We believe that transformational value is typically derived from mixing data from multiple sources, including in-house systems of record.

Our team of data and analytics experts have helped customers with strategy development, critical SAP migrations, and designing, deploying and managing analytics workloads on Google Cloud. With the Google Cloud Cortex Framework, our partnership with Google and our deep SAP expertise, we can help you achieve your SAP analytics vision—together. 

For more insights into SAP innovation with Google Cloud listen to Paul Lewis’s Unlocking SAP Data for Innovation at Google Next 2021, watch our SAP series…. Or, if you’re ready, get started on your journey with our SAP Enterprise Analytics Workshop Assessment.