Heidelberg (Germany) I Singapore, July 29, 2021 – SNP Schneider-Neureither & Partner SE, a world-leading provider of software solutions for digital transformation processes and automated data migrations, signed an agreement today to acquire 100{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22} of the shares in Datavard AG. The software and consulting company with around 170 employees specializes in transformations and data management in SAP landscapes and generated total revenues of around EUR 17.6 million in the 2020 fiscal year. The initial consolidation is expected to take place on August 1, 2021.

The acquisition of Datavard AG plays an important role in the implementation of SNP’s platform strategy, which allows companies to generate maximum value from their data transformation using just one software solution.

Gregor Stöckler, co-founder and CEO of Datavard AG, will join the Board of Managing Directors of SNP SE as the new Chief Operating Officer (COO). He will be responsible for the sales regions USA and UK-Ireland as well as globally for analytics, platform strategy, technology partners and partner marketing.

“With this acquisition, we are expanding our software portfolio to include Datavard’s solutions in the areas of SAP data management and analytics. In both the software and the consulting business, the two portfolios complement each other perfectly. Until now, SNP and Datavard have acted as competitors and partners in the market; in the future, we will use the newly gained strength from the merger of both companies to serve our customers and partners even more comprehensively,” says Michael Eberhardt, CEO of SNP SE.

Datavard has been active in the market for over 20 years and focuses on transformations and data management in SAP landscapes. In the area of transformation, Datavard supports companies in migrating to SAP S/4HANA, modernizing their analytics and data warehouse landscape, and carrying out mergers and acquisitions, carve-outs, and company splits. In the area of data management, Datavard offers solutions for data lifecycle management, business intelligence and analytics, and innovative cloud connectivity solutions that enable SAP customers to integrate and utilize SAP data in applications for artificial intelligence, machine learning and the Internet of things. Over 50 of the Global Fortune 500 and numerous DAX 30 companies are Datavard customers. In addition, the company has an outstanding partner network consisting of national and international players such as Accenture, AppDynamics, Google, Microsoft, SAP and more.

“We are very pleased to now be a part of the market leader for data transformation software solutions in the SAP world,” says Gregor Stöckler, founder and CEO of Datavard AG. “It opens up many new opportunities for our employees, customers and partners. SNP and Datavard have known and appreciated each other for many years as competitors and as partners. In addition, we are successfully collaborating in the “SAP S/4HANA Selective Data Transition Engagement” working group. Together, we will be able to support our customers and partners in their digital transformations even better.”

In addition to its headquarters in Heidelberg, Datavard has two large locations in Slovakia and a strong location in Switzerland. Furthermore, Datavard is also represented in the USA and Singapore in the Asia Pacific Japan region. “We are looking forward to welcoming the new employees, who will strengthen and expand our core business,” says Prof. Dr. Heiner Diefenbach, CFO of SNP SE.

From a regional perspective, Gerald Faust, Managing Director & CEO, Asia Pacific and Middle East, SNP Transformations SEA Pte Ltd., commented,” We are enthused about unifying our capabilities for end-to-end data migration offerings for the SAP eco-system in the strategic and fastest growing Asia Pacific Japan region. Our software platform centric and cultural synergies make us a leading provider for digital data transformation and data management resonating across all major markets.”

Financing

As consideration for the acquisition of all shares in Datavard AG, a cash component of around EUR 20 million and the issue of 173,333 new shares from a capital increase through contributions in kind are planned. An independent valuation has confirmed the appropriateness of the total purchase price. Taking into account Datavard’s double-digit growth expectations for the current year, the purchase price represents 15 times Datavard’s currently expected operating profit for 2021. The new shares will be issued indirectly to Gregor Stöckler and two additional shareholders of Datavard AG, and all three will remain with the company after the transaction. The shares issued will be subject to a 36-month lock-up period.

About Datavard

Datavard is an innovative provider of intelligent solutions and consulting services for SAP data management, SAP S/4HANA migrations, data warehouse modernization, legacy system decommissioning, SAP data integration, big data and system landscape transformations. As a trusted SAP partner with over 20 years of expertise, Datavard helps companies worldwide run their SAP systems leanly, efficiently and profitably. Datavard is headquartered in Heidelberg, Germany, with offices in EMEA, the US and Asia. For more information, visit www.datavard.com.

About SNP

SNP is a world-leading provider of software for managing complex digital transformation processes. Instead of traditional IT consulting in the ERP environment, SNP offers an automated approach using specially developed software: The Data Transformation Platform CrystalBridge^® and the SNP BLUEFIELD^TM approach allow companies to restructure and modernize their IT landscapes much more quickly and securely as well as migrate to new systems or cloud environments more securely. This gives customers clear qualitative advantages while at the same time reducing their time and costs.

The SNP Group has around 1,600 employees worldwide. The company is headquartered in Heidelberg, Germany, and generated revenue of around EUR 144 million in the 2020 fiscal year. It serves multinational companies in all industries. SNP was established in 1994, went public in 2000, and has been listed in the Prime Standard segment of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange since August 2014 (ISIN DE0007203705). Since 2017, the company has been trading as a European company (Societas Europaea/SE).

More information is available at www.snpgroup.com

Contact:

This article is sponsored by SNP

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Following a major rebranding and transformation in 2019, Syniti, formerly established as BackOffice Associates, has officially announced that it will open its first office in Tokyo, Japan under the stewardship of Koji Takahashi, Syniti’s Head of Sales in Japan. The data solution provider has been in the Asia market for almost a decade and has seen a 15X revenue growth with strong profit margins.

Gordon Lam, Syniti President APJ, said:

“We are continuing to see a call for best-in-class knowledge, expertise, and resilient data solutions from Asia-based customers in all key industries.” 

“With the current environment, customers are focus on getting more value from data and finding a data platform to help them accelerate business insights. We are happy to extend our commitment to serve our customers with a proven team of experts, data-centric solutions combined with over 20 years of deep data transformation experience to meet their growing needs,” he added.

A Global Go-To-Market Strategy

The organisation’s global go-to-market strategy such as the expansion to Japan and fusion of the EMEA markets intends to expand the company’s presence in key markets, accelerate innovation, and drive digital transformation. As an SAP Solution Extension Partner, this development aligns with Syniti’s delivery model and territorial coverage with SAP as well as key strategic partners within APJ and EMEA.

Kevin Campbell, the Syniti CEO, shared:

“In the post-pandemic era, we expect to see increased activities in key business initiatives such as Mergers, Acquisition, and Divestitures, where data plays a critical role for success.” 

“Today’s announcement is a stake in the ground that confirms our commitment to helping customers around the globe prepare for these types of seen and even unforeseen changes and innovative moves,” the CEO stressed.

For over 20 years, Syniti has become a leader in enterprise data management solving global enterprises’ most complex data challenges by combining data expertise, intelligent software, and packaged solution accelerators to yield certain and superior business outcomes. Syniti software applies automation and guidance infused by AI and machine learning technologies to data migration, data quality, analytics, master data management, metadata management, and information governance initiatives.

The SAP-Syniti Partnership

SAP Advanced Data Migration by Syniti, one of Syniti’s innovative products specifically tailored to deliver excellent SAP experience to customers, has shown significant business results stated in the recently released IDC White Paper “The Business Value of SAP Advanced Data Migration by Syniti”. The white paper sponsored by Syniti and SAP revealed that:

• A 303 percent three-year return on investment with an average eight-month payback on investment
• 46 percent faster completion of data migration projects
• 96 percent reduction of unplanned downtime

Taking Syniti’s partnership with SAP to the next level, the Syniti Advanced Data Migration app for SAP Ariba solutions is now made available on SAP App Center for customers around the world to access. The app offers a flexible, knowledge-infused solution that can pull structured and unstructured data from any originating source, clean the data based on reusage business rules, and load and harmonise the data for implementations of SAP Ariba solutions.

 “We live in exceptional times in which data management is just as critical as the delivery of tangible goods,” said Kevin Campbell, Syniti CEO. 

“With Syniti’s knowledge-driven, cloud-based Syniti Advanced Data Migration app for SAP Ariba solutions, enterprises can use and reuse knowledge stored within data to address unique demands and to make quick, accurate and insightful decisions to drastically improve business continuity. Based on results of past migrations of other SAP systems, the Syniti solution is expected to help businesses reduce implementation costs by up to 40 percent versus traditional approaches and achieve 67 percent projected efficiency gain,” he detailed.

Boston-headquartered Syniti has over 900 data specialists in 25 offices worldwide.

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Lightning Fast Data Loading

Talend’s Stitch Data Loader now supports Microsoft’s Azure’s SQL Data Warehouse, providing one of the easiest ways for users to get data into a fast, flexible and secure cloud data warehouse. Stitch Data Loader can move data from 90+ data sources in minutes into Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse. The new connector leverages Azure Blob Storage and PolyBase to get data into Azure Cloud and quickly loads it into Azure SQL Data Warehouse. Data type transformation between source and destination, schema changes, security, and bulk loading are all handled seamlessly by Stitch Data Loader. A flexible scheduler allows users to keep their cloud data continuously up to date with built-in replication features. 
 
Companies can easily ingest data and scale with Stitch Data Loader through a frictionless, easy to try, easy to buy process, without needing to talk to a sales person or sign a long-term contract. With the free version of Stitch Data Loader, customers can load 5 million rows per month into Azure SQL Data Warehouse from many popular data sources. Stitch Data Loader connects to SaaS applications, databases, and cloud data sources like Google AdWords, Facebook Ads, MySQL, Salesforce, Stripe, and more. It also powers data ingestion for analytics, business intelligence, machine learning, data science, and automatically scales as data volume grows with nothing to configure, deploy, or maintain.

Data Integration Solution

Azure SQL Data Warehouse is a cloud analytics platform that separates storage and compute to give unique flexibility in deploying a solution for a user’s specific business requirements. This also allows users to stop and start job execution, while keeping data storage persistent. As a result, the solution ensures customers pay only for compute time and resources used. “This is the biggest advancement to our product since we joined Talend, and it signifies our commitment to Microsoft Azure,” said Jake Stein, SVP Stitch at Talend. “Through the self-service cloud data ingestion capabilities of Stitch Data Loader, we make it easier for companies of any size to benefit from seamless onboarding and data ingest, while leveraging data analytics and reporting in Azure SQL Data Warehouse to optimise business outcomes.”

Stitch Data Loader is a component of the Talend Data Fabric, a suite of cloud apps designed to help customers collect, govern, transform and share data and insights. Talend customers can use Stitch Data Loader to begin collecting data with the confidence that Talend can help them solve all of their data integration needs. In addition to Azure SQL Data Warehouse, Talend Cloud provides native Azure connectors for Azure Table Storage, Azure Blob Storage, Azure Queue Storage, Azure Data Lake Store, and Azure Cosmos DB.

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Digital transformation requires companies to reinvent their business models and processes. To take advantage of this trend, organizations need to maintain high data quality and accuracy. This is imperative for organizations that are migrating to SAP S/4HANA, which is becoming the core for all data-driven processes in SAP environments. If an organization’s data is not clean, accurate, and high quality, then these data-driven initiatives are set up to fail before they even begin.

With many organizations actively involved in migrations to SAP S/4HANA, the need to move large volumes of data from legacy systems in a simple but effective way has never been greater. Yet most of these organizations are ignoring a critical factor in ensuring the accuracy and quality of this data: their users.

The importance of user input

Many SAP customers identify business engagement as the most critical success factor of their migration projects. However, in a traditional migration, the business is only involved at the very beginning and the very end of a project. Users are consulted in the planning phase and then don’t re-engage with the project until close to go-live to aid with testing and resolve data-related issues. Frequently, these data issues aren’t identified until the end of the project because users closest to the data aren’t invited to the conversation early enough. They aren’t around to tell IT what data is mission-critical and exactly how it’s being used. This can lead to poor data quality, a lack of visibility into the data, and other issues that can cause cost and time overruns.

These are some of the consequences of an IT-centric approach to data migration. Yet standard migration solutions are designed for technical users with very specific skills, not business users. They come at a high cost but often don’t do anything to ensure that the data migrated is accurate or complies with the business rules of the new system.

This concern is important in any technological migration and is even more so in an SAP S/4HANA migration. SAP S/4HANA simplifies and standardizes many business processes, and data must be cleaned and organized to reflect how the business will use it within the new system.

Empower business teams to get data right

It’s critical to empower business teams to transform and validate data to comply with new rules. For these reasons, Winshuttle offers a business-led approach to automate data uploading and extraction in SAP systems using Microsoft Excel, allowing the business to stay engaged throughout the migration. This enables business users to maintain ownership of data and become familiar with the new system so they can move straight into continuous improvement and process optimization when the migration project comes to an end. At the same time, it does not lessen the technical speed and accuracy that would otherwise be the focus of the migration.

Companies like Winshuttle are paving the way to offer application data management (ADM) solutions that empower business teams to maintain and govern high-quality data within SAP S/4HANA, freeing up IT resources while ensuring that data meets the business’s needs. By empowering users to improve data quality during a migration to SAP S/4HANA and then maintain that quality throughout its use, organizations can have greater confidence in their data and thrive in the digital economy. To learn more, visit www.winshuttle.com/adm.

This article is sponsored by Winshuttle.

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If you type “SAP data migration options for Excel users” into Google, one of the first results that comes up is for data migration scenarios is SAP Business One. This tells you that even with the lowest end SAP system, (effectively entry-class SAP B1) data migration is a big deal.

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The solution allows SAP R/3 users to analyse their operational ERP data in business intelligence tools such as Tableau, QlikView or TIBCO Spitfire, by changing the extract, transform and load (ETL) process into a single-click user action.

According to VirtDB, the solution uses the operating system’s clipboard to obtain data from SAP, so it does not require components to be installed on SAP Application Server.

“We have done many business intelligence projects where the time spent on load-sap-data-from-here-to-there efforts were 40-50 per cent in total. Companies pay big bucks for this,” said Peter Csillag, CEO, VirtDB.

“I liked to be paid well for handcrafting ETL processes on SAP data, but to be honest, it had no added value for customers most of the time. It just killed their productivity by hindering iterations on the data, laming the agility in analytics projects.”

In addition to Data Unfolder Lite, designed for personal use and fast prototyping of BI content, VirtDB has an enterprise grade SAP data management product called Data Unfolder.

“We have released a free version of our SAP data management tool to evangelise the market. Free, agile and SAP words are not common in the same sentence – this is what we want to change,” said Tamas Holics, CTO, VirtDB. “We will always have a free version to provide value to entry level clients as well.”

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When tens of thousands of users switch from using technical developer targeted tools like Legacy System Migration Workbench (LSMW) to Winshuttle Studio – it’s safe to say the need for an easy to use, flexible and robust replacement is high. That’s not to say LSMW is a bad application or unsuited for a particular job. There is certainly a place for tools like LSMW, it just isn’t the tool to use for integration scenarios that involve a dozen or more data records to be created or maintained. LSMW was built by SAP as a tool for IT to utilise during deployment data migrations, and works great as a single instance tool. In my opinion, the issue is that LSMW has become the hammer that every IT department uses to nail every integration scenario that starts with data in a spreadsheet. This can become a problem not only for the end user, but ultimately for everyone – auditors, the business and in the end, even IT.

Getting started

Part of evaluating any integration solution should start with determining what you’re trying to achieve and how long it will take to deliver. Based on numerous conversations with SAP customers across the globe, the consensus is that ABAP skills continue to be in demand, and although the compensation rate is not nearly as high as it was in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s – ABAP skills still aren’t cheap. You don’t necessarily need an ABAP developer to create your LSMW scripts, but it doesn’t take long to understand LSMW isn’t designed to be used by end-users – in fact it should rarely be used in production data management scenarios, unless you are working with exceptionally large amounts of data. LSMW’s highly technical process to upload bulk information to SAP is time consuming and complex. Because LSMW typically requires developer-level authorizations, only a limited number of business users can use the tool to complete SAP data processes.

If you’re considering Winshuttle as a more powerful and easier alternative to LSMW, (the Winshuttle Studio Transaction module in particular) you need to look at the integration sweet spot. The data in this range is more than a dozen records and up to about 50,000 – 100,000.  In this context, LSMW is viewed as a ‘Big Solution’ or ‘Big IT Solution.’ Start thinking about Winshuttle as the pick-up truck for your general SAP application data management tasks that allows you to avoid needing a specialist to help you build Excel to SAP integration.

We recently pulled some usage statistics and found that in the last five years alone, Winshuttle customers have uploaded or maintained over a billion SAP records using the Winshuttle Studio Transaction module spanning hundreds of different SAP transactions from MM01 through FB50 and more obscure transactions. You can find out what automating an SAP transaction with Winshuttle Studio might be worth in time savings by looking at Winshuttle’s ROI calculator.

Winshuttle Studio allows business users to work within the familiar Excel interface to create and update data in SAP. It handles highly complex SAP transactions in three simple steps that would have taken hundreds of hours of development time in LSMW, enabling you to get up and running quickly, with faster data creation and process execution. Creating a script for a process is as simple as launching the Studio recorder and walking through the data creation or change steps. At the end of the transaction walk-through when you save the data and commit it to SAP, the recording is downloaded to the Windows desktop client and can be manipulated by adding more business logic like IF conditions and Loops.

In more advanced cases, you can use chains or linked scripts and even build data validation rules into the script to ensure that any changes you make to SAP data or any SAP data that you create, conforms to your business rules. Customers report that script creation can take anything from just a few minutes to a couple of hours, including testing.

Deployment

The difference between Winshuttle and LSMW comes with deploying and running the integration scenario. Using LSMW means you either have to package an LSMW session as an ABAP program or you have to have the data-file handed off to IT by the business to run. IT running the data-file is often not considered a good approach by audit because the data creation or change is not directly attributable to the responsible business user because IT or system account credentials are used. A massive and cumbersome paper trail needs to be maintained for these types of situations.

With Winshuttle, your script is completely portable, and can be embedded directly into the workbook by any user with the workbook and a Winshuttle Runner or Winshuttle Studio authoring license and SAP credential, allowing you to push, pull and change SAP data for a defined scenario. No ABAP changes, SAP authorisation changes or transports or SAP change management is necessary in order to get started with working with SAP Application Data from an Excel environment almost immediately.

Learn more about the specific differences between the Winshuttle approach to data integration as compared with LSMW by downloading the An Easy, Flexible Alternative to LSMW for Business Users white paper.

This article is sponsored by Winshuttle.

Clinton Jones is a Director for Finance Solutions Management at Winshuttle where he has worked since 2009. He is internationally experienced having worked on finance technologies and business process with a particular focus on integrated business solutions in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and North America. Clinton serves as a technical consultant on technology and quality management as it relates to data and process management and governance for finance organizations globally. Prior to Winshuttle, he served as a Technical Quality Manager at SAP and with Microsoft in their Global Foundation Services group.

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