SAP Business Objects recently announced enhancements to its Data Services and Data Federator software products, part of the SAP Business Objects Information Management (IM) Solutions Portfolio. These products support both SAP and non-SAP IT environments, and now with the latest release have expanded support for SAP customers with integration to the SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse (SAP NetWeaver BW).
SAP BusinessObjects Data Services is a software product that combines data integration and data quality into a single solution, providing companies with one environment for improving data quality and delivering it to various targets. Data Services has many pre-built functions, delivers even tighter integration with SAP applications, and provides the capability to more easily extract, profile, cleanse and integrate data from non-SAP sources and load that data into SAP NetWeaver. Data from SAP NetWeaver BW can also be federated with other sources using Data Federator to provide a combined, virtual data warehouse in real-time.
"Data Services combines enterprise ETL, data quality, and metadata management to help both IT technologists and business users understand key data relationships," Philip On, director of product marketing for SAP Business Objects, tells 5 Minute Briefing. The data quality software ensures that the data the BI platform is using is accurate and complete in real-time, and has other capabilities such as matching and geocoding. The enterprise ETL software enables heterogeneous data integration and is used when physical integration is required to create a data warehouse. Data Federator is used when physical integration is not required, and provides the functionality to integrate data virtually in memory. This gives users the flexibility to rapidly access data from SAP BW or to access data sources outside of BW without going through the process of physical integration.
In addition, companies can now more easily embed data integration and data quality capabilities into applications and processes with an expanded web services-based toolkit for fast and simple integration. This will help SAP customers to ensure trusted data at the application level, providing business users with more accurate data to feed their daily business decisions.
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