The story at TechEd – SAP really wants to leave your data where it is

Anyone who has built a BW system knows the ritual. Extractors, delta queues, process chains that fail at three in the morning. For as long as most of us can remember, the deal in SAP analytics was simple: if you want to analyse it, copy it first.

SAP TechEd opened in Berlin today, its 30th year. The stage belongs to AI agents. But read the data part of SAP’s announcements and a quieter idea comes through. SAP wants to stop moving your data around.

A lakehouse, of all things

The vehicle is Dremio, which SAP bought this year. Dremio is a lakehouse: data sits in open files on ordinary storage, and you query it as if it were a warehouse. It is built on Apache Iceberg, the open table format much of the data world has settled on.

SAP is building that into Business Data Cloud. A federated query engine will reach SAP and non-SAP data without moving or copying it. A planned open catalog on top will tell every engine what the data is, who may see it and where it came from.

If that sounds familiar, it should. Around 2010, TechEd introduced HANA with a similar promise: stop pre-aggregating, just compute in memory. This is the same thought one level up. Stop copying, just query.

The hard part was never the storage

Here’s the catch every BW consultant already knows. Moving data was annoying, but it was never the real work. The real work was knowing what the data means.

A sales order in S/4HANA carries decades of SAP logic. Which date counts, which status matters, why that one field is always empty in plant 1000. Copy the table out and all of that stays behind. Leave the data where it is and you still need someone, or something, to explain it.

SAP seems to know this. Two of today’s announcements are about meaning rather than storage. A new Ontology Manager will let you describe how data from different teams and systems relates, so an agent understands that this supplier, that contract and those invoices belong together. And Reltio, the master data company SAP bought earlier this year, will bring golden records for customers, suppliers and products into Business Data Cloud.

Together they answer two questions every data team fights about. What does this record mean? And which version of it is true?

What this means if you live in BW

Good news, mostly. The plumbing gets lighter, and fewer nights go to failed loads. But the skill that made a good BW consultant was never the extractor. It was knowing what the data in 2LIS_11_VAITM actually tells you about your business.

That knowledge just moved up the stack. In a world where data stays put, the people who can describe it, model it and explain it to an agent become the scarce ones.

Much of this is still a promise, and the details will matter: timing, cost, and how today’s Datasphere models fit in. We’ll be listening for exactly that this week.

At Interdobs we do data. We have spent years moving SAP data around. We’re quite looking forward to spending more time on what it means.