Google Cortex for SAP Customers

As customers embark on their journey to S/4 many ask the question “is SAP business warehouse (SAP BW still required or can all their reporting needs be filled by SAP S/4). In short, there are more requirements for operational reporting and analytics than S/4 can provide. The real question is whether customers should stay with SAP BW or move to another platform. Over the years we have put in a strong business case for staying with SAP BW and now data warehouse cloud (SAP DWC) but have Google now moved the goalposts?

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If you have a quick look at the Google website, they describe Google Cortex as “Google Cloud Cortex Framework allows you to kickstart insights and reduce time-to-value with reference architectures, packaged services, and deployment accelerators that guide you from planning to delivery so you can get up and running quickly.”, but the critical question remains, What is it and how will it help SAP S/4 customers?

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So, in my view, Cortex is very similar to the business content produced by SAP and found within SAP BW or SAP DWC. The framework for Cortex takes data out of an SAP S/4 platform and moves it into Google BigQuery. They provide both extractions and the transformation of the complex SAP ERP business logic, bringing it together into a logical model to produce analytics on top.

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In addition to extracting and storing the data, Google also provides out-of-the-box reporting for those main SAP S/4 business processes. Furthermore, Google provides advanced analytics functions on top of the data models, allowing customers to not only use the artificial intelligence within the Google stack but also merge your transactional data alongside Google search data from platforms such as Google search and YouTube (note that YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world). This is indeed a compelling offering from Google.

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So, why is this important?

For many years SAP customers have tried to embark on a journey away from SAP business warehouse. In my time, I've watched many of these projects fail due to the difficulty in extracting data from ECC and replicating the business logic of SAP ECC within a data lake such as Hadoop. Millions have been spent trying to do this. Some successful, many not. But I can say that the time to deliver a solution has always been significantly longer when using a third-party tool versus using SAP BW combined with business content. ?We then tend to see many customers using SAP BW as an ETL tool, to move data from SAP S/4 and then replicate it into their chosen data lake, I will cover this in another blog.

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What Google does have, is a platform and configuration to de-risk and speed up the extraction and transformation of the data within the SAP world. For me, this is a very clever move by Google and will undoubtedly help those customers who no longer wish to stay with SAP for their analytics.

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On top of this benefit, I feel that the killer business case by Google is to provide access to the search engine data which will allow SAP customers to do advanced analytics on their transactional data alongside non-transactional search engine data. Please note, I am unsure if this option comes at a cost. Knowing Google, they will make this process very easy, and they will provide lots of algorithms for customers to do advanced analytics quickly and easily on top of this content. This end-to-end offering is not something that I see from others, such as AWS and Microsoft.

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Should customers embark on a journey with Google for the SAP analytics reporting?

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Honestly, I don't think many customers will choose Google as a standalone solution. By this, I mean that they will first decide which hyperscaler they will go with and off the back of that decision, they will then decide upon their data and analytics platforms. What Google has done here is, create a competitive solution to the SAP BW or SAP Data Warehouse cloud and mitigate the business content that SAP provides. ?Equally once those customers make the decision to go with a specific hyperscaler such as Google then it is logical that they adopt their data and analytics platforms, this gives the likes of google ownership of future innovation and a long term partnership with customers, something SAP need to get to grips with if they are really going to make a go of SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP)

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Who is Google competition with Cortex?

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I believe it is SAP themselves as this will make customers think harder about the benefit of SAP BW or DWC when they move to SAP S/4, especially those customers who feel SAP have them over a barrel moving to SAP BW/4 and now DWC.

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The real questions that we should all be asking are:

·??????How much Google has invested in Cortex and is this business content real Vs slideware?

·??????Is Cortex mature enough to handle an enterprise-wide global S/4 rollout?

·??????How comparable is Cortex to 20+ years of SAP development found within solutions such as SAP BW?

·??????How quickly can Google move when SAP make changes to their S/4 platform, and if they do, Is this that important to Cortex customers in the future?

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Final Thought

This is what many SAP customers have been waiting for, SAP BW is not end of life but with the push from SAP to get customers onto SAP DWC and the confusion within the SAP toolset perhaps now is the time to think about alternative solutions.

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