American multinational corporation
Customer & challenge
In this case, it is an American multinational corporation. The Data Warehouse and Business Intelligence team of the life sciences corporation had embarked on a Big Data strategy with storage and analytics services that offer more agility and flexibility than traditional data management systems. The team wanted to provision a data lake in the cloud to enable the business users with insights in near real-time. The use of a data lake enables the company to manage different data types, structured and unstructured, from a wide variety of sources, all within a centralized repository.
The customer’s critical business data lives in several different places, including ERP, CRM, and various Financial systems. Bringing Master and Transaction data from the company’s SAP systems into the cloud, in a performant and reliable manner, presented a big challenge. The company previously looked into traditional ETL tools to extract data from SAP, however the tools were expensive and complex, and in some areas error-prone. Extracting incremental data from SAP was challenging because there was no direct delta mechanism available.
“Xtract Universal has enabled our organization to bring SAP data into the cloud in an efficient and reliable manner”
IT Manager, Data Warehouse und Business Intelligence
Solution with Xtract Universal
The company is using Xtract Universal to connect to their on-premises SAP instances and extract data from different sources within SAP. The data extractors for SAP Tables, OLTP-DataSources (DeltaQ) and ABAP Programs that are delivered (among others) with Xtract Universal were particularly useful for the company as they provided the performance, reliability and incremental data extraction capabilities that they were looking for. Once the data is extracted from SAP, it can be stored directly in one of the built-in data destinations, including Amazon S3. Xtract Universal offers over 20 different storage destinations for both cloud and on-premises environments. The company is using an open-source job scheduling program to trigger the SAP data extractions and to further distribute the data from Amazon S3 to other services like Amazon Redshift or Amazon EMR.
Challenge
Extracting delta enabled Master and Transaction data from SAP and feeding data into cloud Data Lake.
Advantages
• Reliable, performant SAP data
extraction
• Support for incremental loads
• Hybrid infrastructure, connecting cloud
services with on-premises SAP data
• Short time to solution (weeks instead of
months)
• Low TCO compared to traditional ETL
platforms
- Cost savings through optimal integration
- no friction losses
- Very fast installation and configuration
