Analytics and business intelligence (ABI) platforms prepare, model, analyze and visualize data to support decision making. They deliver insights through AI-powered conversational experiences, interactive dashboards and classic reporting. They support collaboration between business and technical users for defining the dimensions, measures and business rules used to create and maintain semantic models. The platforms provide functionality for agentic analytics, where AI agents coordinate tasks across the data-to-insight workflow to automate insight delivery under governance and audit controls. Analytics and business intelligence platforms integrate data from multiple sources, such as databases, spreadsheets, cloud services and external data feeds, to provide a unified view of data, breaking down silos and transforming raw data into meaningful insights. They also allow users to clean, transform and prepare data for analysis, in addition to creating data models that define relationships between different data entities.
Data masking is based on the premise that sensitive data can be transformed into less sensitive but still useful data. This is necessary to satisfy application testing use cases that require representative and coherent data, as well as analytics that involve the use of aggregate data for scoring, model building and statistical reporting. The market for data protection, DM included, continues to evolve with technologies designed to redact, anonymize, pseudonymize, or in some way deidentify data in order to protect it against confidentiality or privacy risk.
To reduce both infrastructure costs and manual workloads in postmodern ERP projects, SAP application leaders and SAP Basis operations leaders should evaluate specialized software tools for automating the regular refresh of their SAP ERP test data. SAP selective test data management tools perform selective copying of SAP test data, but they vary in their approach to data selection, scrambling and performance optimization. There are two user constituencies for these tools: (1) Basis operations teams require repetitive data copy operations that must be as automated as possible (2) SAP application data objects for ad hoc data copying. Some of the tools also enable Basis operations teams to produce a 'shell system,' which is an identical copy of a complete production system, but without the transaction data. This is very useful in many projects for testing purposes. (Retired as of Jul-02-2026).