SAP® Solutions for Information Management Add Significant Innovations to Help Organizations Turn Data into Dollars

WALLDORF, Germany, July 11, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today unveiled the 4.2 versions of SAP® Data Services and SAP® Information Steward, flexible, open and real-time data management software with over 30 years of product development. Worldwide enterprises have chosen SAP for the breadth of information management solutions that offer new and enhanced capabilities to help integrate, transform and improve the value of data. These solutions address the need for better information governance, meet big data requirements and create a simpler user experience that helps organizations run better.

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Data stewards now have the ability to assess the financial consequence of poor data across a range of critical business initiatives, such as information governance, big data analytics, business intelligence (BI), data migrations and more. The new business impact analysis feature of SAP Information Steward enables users to track metrics and assign a financial value to each data issue, as well as identify potential savings using what-if analysis of adjusting the quality levels.

Users are also guided step-by-step by a data quality advisor feature to rapidly measure and fix the quality of their information assets. This new capability provides intelligence to analyze and assess data and make recommendations for any required remedies to data issues, such as using built-in workflows to allow the user to refine cleansing rules to get even better data correction results. SAP Information Steward now has the ability to be seamlessly integrated with other solutions, for example with the SAP® Master Data Governance application, to offer a one-click launch of the governance process to correct enterprise master data based on data quality analysis.

"The vision of American Water's data management program is to have the data life cycle baked into everyday business," said Veronica Kinsella, enterprise data lead, American Water. "We are integrating SAP Data Services and SAP Information Steward for a more complete approach to data quality, allowing key data elements to go through upfront validations and proactive data reviews as well as producing scorecards and monitoring reports that help measure the quality of data overtime."

Additional capabilities of the 4.2 versions of SAP Data Services and SAP Information Steward include the ability to:

• Build the best record for 360-degree customer view: Utilizing a user-friendly interface, data stewards can easily consolidate duplicate records to create a golden record. This helps minimize manual effort with customizable best record survivorship rules and establish a repeatable governance process.
• Add locations to addresses for greater business value: SAP Data Services continues to increase global coverage of 240 countries with new enhancements to address cleansing support across 36 countries and geocoding enhancements across 20 countries. Addresses enhanced with latitude and longitude coordinates can be combined with geographic and topological features to gain new analytical and operational insights.
• Continued support for big data: In addition to support for Apache Hadoop, a simplified software developer kit (SDK) for SAP Data Services enables organizations to gain insight from a variety of new data sources, including NoSQL databases, social media and cloud solutions.

"As one of the largest packaged food companies in North America, ConAgra Foods must process and analyze massive amounts of data across a wide variety of brands on a daily basis," said Tim Hack, lead data warehouse administrator, ConAgra Foods. "SAP Data Services has allowed us to easily integrate between SAP ERP Central Component and many other systems to experience a more seamless view and flow of company data."

In May 2013, SAP was named a winner in the 10th annual Nucleus Research Technology ROI Awards, which highlights organizations that have successfully leveraged IT deployments to maximize value per dollar spent. SAP was recognized for its implementation of the SAP HANA® platform and SAP Data Services to build a customer data standardization and matching service (SAM) that produced a return on investment (ROI) of 422 percent in just four months. Nucleus Research found that the project enabled SAP to reduce the need to purchase outside data services, avoid increasing its number of data stewards and increase the productivity of sales and marketing staff.

"With the SAM solution, our company has improved the speed and quality of integrating customer data from multiple sources, including our recent M&A," said Maria Villar, group vice president, Global Data Management, Global Customer Operations, SAP AG. "We are using one SAM solution across the company and in multiple applications, thereby reducing operational cost and technology costs. In my experience setting up information governance programs, I've come to truly believe in the advantages of robust technologies such as SAP HANA and SAP Data Services. Companies cannot scale without the proper technology."

SAP Grows Lead in Information Management Rankings
SAP solutions for the all enterprise software market experienced above-market growth in 2012, outpacing growth of the overall market and many leading competitors. Data quality and data integration solutions from SAP have been positioned by Gartner as a Market Share Leader in its "Market Share Analysis: All Software Markets, Worldwide, 2012."* In the report, SAP holds the No. 2 market position for overall data integration and data quality tools, within one percentage point of the market share leader. SAP ranks No. 1 in Data Quality, with 11.4 percent market share worldwide, the fastest growth among the five top vendors.

"We believe to once again be named a leader in market share by Gartner is validation of our strategy of provide customers with best-of-breed information management solutions," said Byron Banks, global vice president, Information Management, SAP. "This holistic set of solutions helps customers measure and extract business value from their data, which can improve business performance by increasing the accuracy of analytics, uncover new insights from big data, and optimize the efficiency of all business processes."

SAP solutions for information management have received high rankings in recent analyst reports. In May 2013, SAP Data Services was positioned in the leadership sector of the "Information Difference Data Quality Landscape" report. The "MDM Institute Field Report: SAP Master Data Governance" [PDF] characterized master data governance solutions from SAP as having the ability to provide lower total cost of ownership (TCO) relative to the alternatives of custom data governance framework or non-SAP provided data governance solutions.

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*Gartner – "Market Share All Software Markets Worldwide: Data Integration Tools and Data Quality Tools" – March 2013

About Gartner
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

About SAP
As market leader in enterprise application software, SAP (NYSE: SAP) helps companies of all sizes and industries run better. From back office to boardroom, warehouse to storefront, desktop to mobile device – SAP empowers people and organizations to work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively to stay ahead of the competition. SAP applications and services enable more than 238,000 customers to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and grow sustainably. For more information, visit www.sap.com.

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