Evaluate Microsoft components
The partnership between SAP and Microsoft extends beyond the Azure hosting infrastructure. For instance, SAP apps and data integrate with Microsoft Teams and Office to improve collaboration and enhance the user experience. Services and connectors that integrate with SAP products and services are available for Power BI analytics, Azure Data Factory, Azure Data Lake, and others. Additionally, an Azure Marketplace search results in multiple related SAP and third-party images, templates, and services that work with SAP products and services.
- You can interact with SAP data directly from Microsoft Office applications including Office 365, Teams, and Skype for Business.
- Azure Data Factory allows you to build advanced pipelines to automate data movement and transformation. SAP connectors in Azure Data Factory often use the integration runtime to communicate with the SAP system, and therefore the installation of this component is mandatory to enable data replication.
- Azure Data Lake and distributed processing complement the fast engine of the SAP HANA database. Both technologies should be used in parallel, as each solution addresses a specific and unique workload. Implementing a data-tiering strategy can drastically reduce the cost of running an SAP HANA database as archived information is offloaded to external stores and accessed only when needed.
- Microsoft Power BI is a solution for building visualizations on SAP data and blending SAP data with external data sources. Organizations that have SAP Business Warehouse can enhance their current analytics capabilities by implementing Power BI as the visualization layer for existing models and queries. For smaller implementations, Power BI can eliminate the need for data warehouse solutions altogether.