Newsbyte: SAP Delivers New Enterprise Information Management Innovations to Help Customers Gain Trusted Information for Better Analytics and Business Processes

HOUSTON, Oct. 8, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced new software packages for enterprise information management (EIM) that help organizations put trusted and timely information into the hands of decision-makers and enable the most accurate and efficient business processes. The announcement was made at the eighth annual 2012 Americas' SAP Users' Group (ASUG) Data Governance Special Interest Group (SIG) fall face-to-face event, being held October 8, 2012, in Houston, Texas.

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SAP Delivers New Packages to Accelerate Customer Success
The new EIM software packages from SAP are designed to provide a complete offering, tailored to support the most important information management needs of the business. The packages include:

• SAP Data Services, accurate processes option optimizes the performance of business processes through providing accurate information for SAP® Business Suite software customers with a complete solution to profile, improve, integrate and monitor the quality of operational data assets.
• SAP Data Services, accurate analytics option provides a complete solution to ensure analytics and decisions are based on accurate information residing in any data warehouse or data mart, including the SAP HANA® platform, the SAP® Sybase® IQ server and the SAP NetWeaver® Business Warehouse application.
• SAP Data Services, enterprise edition provides an enterprise-wide solution for integrating and improving all data sources and applications within an organization.
• SAP® Enterprise Master Data Management (SAP Enterprise MDM) delivers an end-to-end governance solution offering to address both centralized and decentralized data ownership approaches for all key data domains. The package helps ensure master data dependability from the point of creation, as well as from consolidation and enrichment across diverse heterogeneous sources.

These new offerings were announced during the yearly conference for the ASUG Data Governance SIG, a 12,000 member community organized through volunteer and grass roots efforts where SAP customers come together to share best practices and advance their information governance efforts.

"We are continuing the shift to an end-to-end data governance focus with which to align and support our core business processes," said Jodi Maciejewski, director, Data Governance, ConAgra Foods. "We will leverage SAP technology to help us enable more accurate and timely data, to better support the core of what we do at ConAgra Foods. As an SAP customer and chair of the ASUG Data Governance community, I see great value in sharing best practices with peers in other companies as we mature our data governance program."

SAP Innovations for Managing Information
The EIM software packages are based on updates to EIM solutions released earlier this year, including SAP® Information Steward software, the SAP® Master Data Governance application and SAP® Data Services software. SAP Information Steward extends insights by providing easy-to-use metrics and dashboards to both end users and IT professionals. The features enable anyone in an organization to continuously monitor and improve the composition and trustworthiness of data sources available to them. SAP Data Services provides a complete foundation to integrate, improve and manage all relevant information regardless of data type or location. The improved data movement and quality management capabilities extend not only to any transactional system but also to analytical and "big data" sources such as social media and machine-generated and geographic data.

National Vision has expanded their information management journey, starting with a data warehouse initiative and evolving to support of an enterprise-wide information architecture.

"At National Vision, we involved the business users in the process, enabling business users to access customer data from a centralized location," said Louann Seguin, vice president, Information Technology and Strategy, National Vision. "Our use of EIM tools from SAP for information access and cleansing helped us shift our IT focus from custom development to strategic integration."

SAP Master Data Governance enables businesses to proactively manage the creation and maintenance of master data while allowing the data to be safely and reliably used and reused throughout the organization. With up-front governance, companies can improve the consistency of master data to help increase business process efficiency and reduce total cost of ownership.

"By deploying SAP Master Data Governance, we are able to meet our high requirements for the quality of our master data," said Bjoern Ebeling, associate director, Merck KGaA. "This innovative and stable solution also supports ownership policies and harmonized processes in material master-data management."

Superior Business Momentum
SAP continues to gather momentum in the EIM market and with analysts. SAP was recognized as a leader in Gartner's 2012 "Magic Quadrant for Data Quality Tools" report¹ and is now the No. 2 market share leader in the data integration and quality space, according to Gartner's "Market Share: All Software Markets, Worldwide, 2011" report.² Additionally, the SAP Data Services product has been recognized for leadership in ease of use according to Passionned's "ETL Tools & Data Integration" survey. MDM solutions from SAP received a high market strength score in the "MDM Landscape Q2 2012" report from Information Difference.

Worldwide customers, including ConAgra Foods, Merck KGaA and National Vision, have chosen SAP for the breadth of EIM solutions that address the need for better information governance, "big data" requirements and a simpler user experience.

"SAP's customer successes as well as the industry endorsements we have received serve as strong evidence of the value of deploying these EIM solutions," said Steve Lucas, global executive vice president and general manager, Database & Technology, SAP. "We will continue to innovate and deliver market-leading solutions that enable all companies to proactively manage and govern their enterprise information, thereby providing a complete view of the enterprise that is essential for more effective decision-making and business operations while minimizing IT costs."

For more information, visit the SAP Newsroom. Follow SAP on Twitter at @sapnews.

Media Contacts:
Samantha Finnegan, +1 (650) 276-9350, [email protected], PDT
Jeff Neal, +1 (925) 236-5035, [email protected], PDT

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SOURCE SAP AG