The Power and Potential of Data Virtualization

Let’s be blunt here. If you are not seriously planning to launch Data Virtualization initiatives in the coming months, you are likely to lag in supporting your company’s ability to remain competitive. You simply cannot sustain the historic infrastructure costs of all the ballast along with the time to implement and maintain integration middleware as it has been for years (decades, really). Data Virtualization is clearly a game changer.

There is a whole spectrum of Data Virtualization (DV).  I see a significant amount of confusion about data virtualization once you get past the basic concept that data from multiple sources can be combined and made available as if it were a single source. Most people are extremely narrow in their view of the scope, value and uses of DV.  

• DV can be about creating a virtual enterprise data model for querying
• DV can be about creating virtual MDM definitions
• DV can be about simplifying the layers of services for any application
• DV can be about eliminating the majority of staging data bases in your organization
• DV can be about defining exactly the domain required by an application or portal
• DV can be about significantly improving your time to value for any integration you need
• DV can be about simplifying most any IT project
• DV can be about Business Analytics and Business Intelligence
• DV can be about Big Data

Data Virtualization is poised to drive a fundamental shift in the way IT departments and solution providers address the classic messy challenges of data integration and data availability. Think in terms of shedding the layers and layers of legacy accommodation that have been necessary simply because it has been “impossible” to align disparate data.

A word of caution:  if your Data Virtualization platform requires your data to be in a specific format (e.g., relational or XML) in order to include it in the data virtualization, then you are defying the concept altogether. You are having to do things like move your operational data from instruments to relational databases, and you have to put your SAP data into some form that the DV platform can deal with.  That’s a far cry from accessing live data!

Enterprise Enabler® deals with all types of sources live directly from the source. And, the concepts of DV are also applied to other patterns, for example, eliminating staging for ETL.

SAP Best Practices Streamlined by Agile Integration

With the augmentation of Business Object Data Integrator with ETL and the Rapid Marts, the orderliness of SAP reaches further out toward legacy sources.  SAP's ECC Master Data Structures, SAP AIO BP ("SAP All-in-One Best Practices" ), among other things, define and document IDOC structures for master data elements.

These tools work reasonably well as long as you are dealing with single source to the master definition.  Unfortunately, what lies beyond SAP in your environment is anybody's guess. If  more than half of these work for you "out-of-the-box,"  you must live a charmed life!   More than likely, your legacy sources impose a huge need for custom programming to align multiple data sources and transform them to meet the Best Practices requirements.  The variability and unknowns of your environment  probably will never be able to be addressed easily by SAP's tools, and yet that necessary custom programming consumes a good chunk of your budget and timeline.

Typical integration certification is for one source to SAP. Both the source and the destination have pre-defined schemas, which is virtually never true in real life. Again, with this, we see that this type of adapter seldom works without custom programming adjustments.

Whatever approach you are planning on using for your migration of legacy data to SAP,  you are most certainly facing a formidable, time consuming, and costly exercise.  SAP has greatly improved their tools and best practices over the years, and highly trained and experienced SAP consultants, architects, and programmers have contributed to streamlining the task of data migration. 

This is where Agile Integration Software (AIS), with its light-of-foot cross-application federation, can make a huge difference to your overall  success in meeting your objectives, and in ensuring that as changes occur, they can be accommodated quickly and easily.  That point where data migration becomes a nightmare is where AIS like Enterprise Enabler are the best solution.  The earlier it is introduced into the plan, the better, as some project steps may simply no longer be necessary.

Given the magnitude of a migration from Legacy systems to SAP, and of the ongoing integration required, it has to be a worthwhile effort to establish what the value could be to your project. With a high probability of a minimum of 50% reduction in manpower and elapsed time to implement the integrations, and a rapid, easy path to demonstrating this, why take the risk of NOT investigating?

You owe it to your shareholders, and to yourself to seriously consider AIS!