Unlocking SAP Data for AI and Analytics with Boomi

An SAP system is the operational heart of the business for most enterprises. However, this vault can be a cumbersome fortress in today’s hyperconnected world as the very data the company needs to power next-generation analytics, fuel AI initiatives, and create seamless customer experiences is often locked away and difficult to integrate with modern, non-SAP applications.

Moreover, complex migrations to SAP S/4HANA, the proliferation of applications like Salesforce and ServiceNow, and the business’s demand to build a trusted data warehouse in Snowflake or Databricks add to the challenge of seamlessly integrating data.

An on-demand SAPinsider webinar with Boomi titled “Unlocking Your SAP Data Goldmine: 40% Higher Efficiency When Connecting SAP to Anything,” discussed these challenges and gave insights on Boomi’s capabilities in integrating SAP with non-SAP applications, reducing data extraction efforts by 40%, and supporting AI and analytics initiatives.

A Bridge to the Entire Business

According to the speakers at the webinar, the core issue isn’t a lack of tools, but a lack of the right kind of integration. Many SAP customers face the pain of building custom extraction frameworks with ABAP developers, only to find them rigid, expensive to maintain, and a source of constant technical risk.

This is where an Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) like Boomi changes the game as it connects at the SAP application layer. Boomi for SAP, an SAP-certified solution, communicates with SAP in the way it was designed to be communicated with, rather than through risky, direct database connections that can trigger licensing challenges and data rate limits.

The solution adheres to all the security protocols and rules the organization has established, ensuring it can unlock data without compromising the system or budget. As the speakers pointed out, the approach is complementary and Boomi wants to leave “SAP to SAP, and connect the organization to non-SAP applications.”

Slashing Integration Time

The promise of reducing data extraction and integration efforts by 40% sounds bold, but it translates into tangible business velocity. This means completing more projects in a year, as well as quicker innovation and a faster response to market changes.

The speakers gave the example of Abudawood Logistics, a Middle East-based logistics company, to highlight the effectiveness of fast integration times. The company was struggling with a two-week lead time to get data from its SAP system into its data warehouse. However, by using Boomi for SAP, Abudawood reduced the data delivery time from two weeks to two hours. This, in turn, fundamentally transformed the data team’s capability, as integration projects that once took days could now be delivered within hours.

Powering the Future of AI and Analytics

Finally, unlocking SAP data is all about fueling analytics and AI engines that are fast becoming the brain of the modern enterprise system. However, these initiatives are only as good as the data on which they’re built. If SAP data is stale, incomplete, or untrustworthy, the AI models will falter and BI dashboards will mislead.

Boomi’s platform provides the automated pipelines needed to ingest SAP data into cloud data warehouses, such as Snowflake or Databricks, and combine it with data from the rest of the enterprise. It helps synchronize and govern that data, ensuring the organization is building its analytics on a foundation of trust. Thus, by automating the entire Extract, Load, Transform process, Boomi allows data teams to stop wrestling with pipelines and focus on delivering the insights and ROI the business is evaluated on.

What This Means for SAPinsiders

• Prioritize certified, application-layer integration. To avoid technical risk and hidden licensing costs, insist on an SAP-certified solution that connects at the application layer. This ensures the organization integrates with SAP in a safe, compliant, and future-proof manner as it connects to non-SAP applications.
• Turn integration from a bottleneck into an accelerator. An efficient integration strategy can radically accelerate data projects. Leveraging a platform like Boomi can reduce data extraction efforts by up to 40%, turning what was once a multi-week development cycle into a task measured in hours.
• Build a trusted foundation for AI and analytics. Unlocking SAP data is the first step. To power reliable AI and analytics, SAPinsiders need a platform that can not only move the data but also synchronize and govern it within a modern cloud data warehouse, ensuring your most critical initiatives are built on trusted data.