Gen-BI, Analytics & Reporting on SAP without ODP

SAP recently retracted permission to legitimately extract ERP data from its systems using ‘ODP’ (note 3255746) – severely hampering the use of third-party tools for analytics and reporting on SAP data. Fortunately, Pyramid does not use the ODP APIs, and instead offers direct, fast and fully functional analytics on SAP – certified out of the box – so customers are not forced to use SAP’s own suite of tools. 

Background 

SAP APIs for Operational Data Provisioning (ODP) have been used by numerous third-party tools and applications as the main conduit for extracting data from SAP to alternative destinations for various purposes, with analytics and reporting chief among them. The APIs were technically never supported by SAP, however, their use by third party applications was not blocked and a tremendous amount of tech relies on them. Vendors like Fivetran, Informatica, Talend, Theobald, SNP Glue, Matillion, Azure Data Factory and others have embedded these APIs into their architectures as a key mechanism for extracting SAP data for other downstream purposes. 

In early 2024, SAP formally notified its ecosystem that the use of ODP APIs was “NOT permitted by SAP” – a change from the previous text of “NOT supported by SAP.” This ultimately creates a huge issue for technologies based on ODP – and blocks an effective and efficient means for driving apps based on SAP data housed in other data warehouses like Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery or Azure Fabric.  

In turn, this severely hampers any third-party reporting and analytics tools that were deployed on the presumption that they would be operating on extracted SAP data. It’s a significant wrinkle to contend with, since the alternative of connecting directly to SAP through different APIs is a major technological effort that can take years to deliver, if at all. 

Motivations 

While this is somewhat speculative, there is ample evidence that SAP has always been concerned about losing control of customers’ ERP data, since there is genuine concern that if the data goes, SAP’s long-term grip on customers may become a lot less ‘sticky’. This has come into sharper focus over the last few years as more and more customers move their SAP data into venues that give them the freedom to use other technologies without all the baggage: technical complexities, license fees, incomplete offerings and/or outdated tools from SAP itself. The effort to plug the “data leak” has taken on a more strategic focus with initiatives like SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Datasphere,  counter solutions to other data warehouses and BI tools.  

• Read more about this in this blog from Snap Analytics. 

Pyramid: Modern, Self-Service, Full Function and Direct on SAP without ODP 

This is where solutions like Pyramid can make a significant difference. Pyramid doesn’t work off the ODP APIs and does not extract SAP data. Instead, it DIRECTLY queries SAP (BW, HANA, HANA Cloud, Datasphere, Sybase IQ) without extracting all the data – to drive sophisticated analytics and reporting using modern self-service capabilities. Importantly, it can fully harness the business logic and security structures built into these technologies, so that there is no redundancy in function or need to recreate layers. And of course, it offers identical functionality for any other data source used in the enterprise, so there is no need to use multiple tools to report across multiple data sets from different technologies. In fact, Pyramid’s latest Generative BI functionality, for example, is fully functional and operates on any SQL-compliant data source as well as SAP BW, HANA, Sybase IQ and Datasphere – bringing the latest in analytics to the enterprise and SAP’s now partially ‘closed’ ecosystem.