SAP Now Allows Businesses To Layer Big Data With Google Maps And Earth
Business software giant SAP is collaborating with Google to offer an updated software product in its BusinessObjects Explorer, that helps customers manage and layer large data volumes with Google Maps and Earth.
Context & Ripple Effects
With no build-up in our own coverage, this lands as a single-move announcement: SAP has updated BusinessObjects Explorer so customers can layer large data volumes directly onto Google Maps and Earth, per the confirmed collaboration between the two companies. The significance is distribution — Google's mapping stack, until now a consumer and developer product, gets a supported home inside SAP's enterprise BI tooling.
The timing matters on both sides. For Google, the deal lands during a stretch of intense activity: the same day it added public transport directions for the London Underground to Maps, even as enforcers in the U.S. and EU investigate its business practices, and while analysts publicly suggested it might be wiser to settle its rumored Oracle patent showdown than go to trial. For SAP, it hands BusinessObjects Explorer a visual hook for its big-data story at a moment when exploration tools are the pitch.
First-order effects
- BusinessObjects Explorer customers gain an out-of-the-box path to render large datasets geographically inside their existing SAP tooling rather than stitching together separate GIS work.
- Google extends Maps and Earth into SAP's enterprise installed base, adding a commercial B2B surface to a franchise whose momentum that week was still consumer-facing features like London Underground directions.
Second-order effects
- Each new enterprise deployment of Google's mapping stack widens the footprint U.S. and EU enforcers are already scrutinizing, so routine SAP customer wins become data points in an active antitrust record.
- For SAP, geographic layering becomes a demonstrable differentiator for Explorer's explore-first pitch on big data, raising the bar rivals must match in their own visualization suites.
Third-order effects
- If consumer-grade web services keep being embedded wholesale into enterprise software, the line between licensed business applications and free consumer platforms thins, with vendors competing on integration quality rather than ownership of the underlying asset.
- Should enterprise embeds become a pattern, regulators weighing Google's market power gain concrete cases showing how far its mapping reach extends into corporate workflows.
The trend: Enterprise business intelligence is absorbing consumer web services like maps as native layers, turning location into a default dimension of corporate data analysis.