SAP TechEd 2024: What’s new in SAP Datasphere?

First of all, Datasphere’s feature set is being expanded upon with popular functionalities from SAP BW(/4HANA). In this approach, we really do see SAP putting in the effort to close the gap between Datasphere and BW(/4HANA) at an increasing pace. Although some of these features are already present in Datasphere today, the coming quarters will see them improved to bring them closer to what SAP BW(/4HANA) has delivered for many years now.

• Multilanguage support (especially with AI use cases in mind).
• Currency Conversion made available in more modeling artifacts.
• More extensive hierarchies (in different formats).
• Time dependencies (e.g. to determine the validity of specific data records).
• Variables in Datasphere models.
• Business Content (that can be (re)used for actual use cases).

The second big announcement for Datasphere was the support for Data Lake technology with SQL on files. This is something that the solution sorely lacked in our opinion, as competitors such as Snowflake had a significant leg up on SAP when it came to mass cold storage options. Curiously, SAP kind of positioned the Data Lake (for Datasphere) as a ‘soft’ replacement for BW(/4HANA) in terms of storage (obviously without the logic from BW(/4HANA)). Although we doubt whether this will be its practical use, the Lake functionality does allow data to be stored in its original state while maintaining the relevant business context. Note that it can also be scaled easily through SAP’s (newly “Integrated”) Object Store. The details on the implementation of this feature, which is to be delivered in Q4 of this year, are still somewhat vague. Having said that, we expect that this path will be similar to how data lake is currently offered through SAP HANA Cloud and that it will involve the Migration Cockpit. The Data Lake capabilities are a welcome expansion upon Datasphere however, and we will be eager to see whether it will also become possible to connect to non-SAP lake sources, such as Amazon’s S3 for example, as this would open up even more use cases.

Smaller announcements on Datasphere included more compute elasticity (and power) with Spark Compute; a feature that is currently present in SAP Data Intelligence and that will be a welcome addition to Datasphere. Strangely enough, we would have expected more visible efforts from SAP to close the functionality gap between SAP Data Intelligence (DI; which is now being deprecated) and SAP Datasphere. Although we will get the first Generative AI-enhanced workflows in Datasphere in Q1 of 2025, there is still quite a feature set that would be valuable to customers currently in DI (e.g. Jupyter Notebooks), but we will have to wait and see what SAP’s plans are in this regard.

Moving on, improvements with regards to SAP’s partnerships were also highlighted. A deeper integration with Collibra was showcased through Datasphere artifacts becoming available in Collibra in Q4 2024. We believe that, with the continuing convergence of the DSP Marketplace and Catalog, SAP’s partnership with Collibra will most likely culminate in a combination (unification?) of Collibra’s catalog (based in their own Collibra Data Intelligence solution) and Datasphere's Marketplace/Catalog. Although this would obviously raise some eyebrows, the concept would provide users of both SAP Datasphere and Collibra with a very powerful data governance tool.

Support for Confluent Kafka was also mentioned as being invested in, although this announcement was more or less limited to it becoming a source for DSP replication flows. More interesting was the mention of newly supported Data Products for the Data Marketplace in the context of SAP’s Business Data Fabric. This will boil down to improved data integration (e.g. semantic onboarding) and sharing between SAP’s flagship solutions (e.g. SAP HANA Cloud, SAP S/4HANA and BW/4HANA) and Datasphere, with BW Bridge mentioned as a new source for the Marketplace as well. The latter is an interesting addition, as it could be a way for customers to speed up their migration from BW(/4HANA) to Datasphere.

Image courtesy of SAP SE (2024).

All in all, we can conclude that SAP is focusing on three main development areas in the context of SAP Datasphere: the bridging of the functionality gap between DSP and BW(/4HANA), integration and exchange of data with (non-)SAP systems and the enablement of Generative AI. If you want to know what implications this may have for your IT landscape, or you are curious on how to make the most of SAP’s feature direction, don’t hesitate and contact us!

Credits

This blog about the highlights of SAP TechEd 2024 was written by our experts Lars van der Goes and Stefan Rijnkels.