What’s Up With SAP Data Hub?

Some time ago, someone advised me to stop focusing so much on SAP Data Hub. When former SAP executive Franz Faerber first presented the idea during a Sapphire Now Conference in Orlando, I was excited for the possibilities that Data Hub promised. The core idea: Customers wouldn’t have to move their data anymore, ever. The data itself is not moved but stays in silos. If an app needs to access the data stored in a different app, there’s no copy and paste, but a reference to the other app instead. Meanwhile, the app requesting the data ‘feels’ like it has stored it itself.

For this system to work, the app storing the data has to take care of data processing and structuring for the app requesting the data, since the information itself cannot be moved. The requesting app will suffer no consequences, but the storing app could. If users request too much data, workload increases drastically, and the app’s server uses its resources solely on requests.

No luck with SAP Data Hub

SAP Data Hub has a great underlying concept, but SAP missed by a mile on its execution. A server that does nothing all day but fielding and complying with data access requests from apps and systems soon becomes worthless. Nobody knows how many resources the core concept of SAP Data Hub would require in practice. On paper, the concept is brilliant, but in reality, it becomes unmanageable.

SAP therefore still has a lot of work to do before it will have completely harmonized and consolidated the data complexity in ERP systems, in the cloud and on prem.