SAP rolls out Cloud for Analytics to surface and analyze data from multiple on-premise and cloud stores
Context & Ripple Effects
Cloud for Analytics is the third move in SAP's 2015 campaign to make HANA the connective tissue of its portfolio: it follows the February revamp of Business Suite around a new UI and HANA analytics and September's Vora engine plugging into Spark for faster big data queries. What is new here is the reach beyond SAP's own stores — the service surfaces and analyzes data sitting in multiple on-premise and cloud locations at once.
The significance is that SAP is positioning itself as the analytics layer over hybrid estates, not just the system of record. That appetite for owning the data layer shows up repeatedly afterward: buying big data startup Altiscale the next year, running Cloud Platform services on top of HANA by 2018, and ultimately acquiring open lakehouse provider Dremio alongside the Prior Labs bet a decade later.
First-order effects
- Enterprises running hybrid landscapes get one analytics surface spanning on-premise and cloud data stores, removing the need to consolidate data before analyzing it.
- SAP's cloud applications gain native analytics that pull in non-SAP data, strengthening the bundle it sells against standalone BI tools.
Second-order effects
- Standalone business-intelligence and big-data vendors face an ERP incumbent that can pre-integrate analytics into the systems customers already run, pressuring them on distribution rather than features.
- The gap between what SAP builds and what the data market demands keeps forcing acquisitions — the Altiscale purchase in 2016 and the eventual Dremio deal are both responses to that same shortfall.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the analytics and data-management layer consolidates into the application vendors themselves, ending the era where BI, data lakes, and transactional ERP are bought separately.
- That consolidation becomes the foundation for the AI-era stack: by pairing Dremio's lakehouse with Prior Labs and a pledged €1B investment, SAP turns a decade-old 'analyze anywhere' pitch into a vertically integrated AI platform.
The trend: Enterprise software vendors are steadily absorbing the separate data and analytics layer into their own platforms, with SAP buying its way from HANA analytics through lakehouses toward an integrated AI stack.