SAP has opened its newest data center in Mumbai. The data center reflects the company’s deepening commitment to India, the world’s fastest-growing large economy and home to more than 15,000 employees of the Germany-based enterprise software provider.
With the new data center in India complementing existing ones in Europe, the U.S., and Saudi Arabia, SAP has dramatically strengthened the data federation capabilities of SAP Business Network Commerce Automation, linking together the procurement processes of businesses and their trading partners across the globe.
With this milestone, SAP has delivered on a crucial promise made to a highly consequential set of customers in the Indian subcontinent and beyond. Later this year, the India data center will extend data federation capabilities for SAP Business Network Supply Chain Collaboration as well.
But what is data federation? And why is it so consequential for organizations in India and elsewhere?
Data federation assembles a unified view of data from disparate sources without physically moving or copying it. Trading partners can thus exchange goods and services across international borders while the data underlying those transactions remains stationary. By preserving the integrity of data where it resides, federation facilitates mission-critical operational processes on a global scale while achieving regulatory consistency with compliance requirements that arise at a national level. For example, if a buyer’s data resides in SAP Business Network’s India data center but its supplier’s data sits in the U.S. data center, federation provides both parties with access to each other’s data without impinging on either nation’s policies governing the residency of that data. This becomes especially important as new legislation gathers pace around the world in response to rising concerns over individual privacy, national security and commercial sectors considered sensitive.
