What happens when a company with 100,000 employees needs to turn massive amounts of data into something everyone can actually use?

In this episode of Let’s Talk Data, Bradley Vaslik sits down with Oliver Huth, Head of Platform and Engineering at SAP, to unpack SAP’s journey from a centralized data warehouse and thousands of dashboards to a scalable data product economy.

Oliver shares the real-world challenges behind SAP’s transformation—including data silos, changing business demands, governance, and the struggle to give employees faster access to trusted data.

The conversation explores how SAP Business Data Cloud, SAP Datasphere, and Databricks are helping SAP build a more flexible and reusable data foundation—and why data products are becoming increasingly important as AI changes the way businesses work.

But there’s a bigger story: AI is only as powerful as the data behind it.

Oliver explains why trusted enterprise data is becoming the critical foundation for analytics, applications, AI, and intelligent agents—and why measuring data product adoption and reuse may be one of the most important metrics for modern data teams.

A practical conversation about data strategy, governance, AI, and what it takes to make enterprise data truly work at scale.

5 Key Topics of Discussion:

• The Evolution from Data Warehouses to Data Products SAP’s shift from a centralized data warehouse and dashboard model to a scalable, self-service data product approach.

• Building Trust and Governance in Data How data ownership, quality, governance, lineage, and adoption help organizations create trusted data that can be reused across teams.

• How SAP Defines and Manages Data Products The role of data product owners, domains, output ports, primary and derived data products, and the processes used to build and consume them.

• Business Data Cloud and the Modern Data Architecture How SAP Business Data Cloud, Datasphere, Databricks, and existing BW investments work together to support SAP’s data product strategy.

• Data Products as the Foundation for AI Why trusted, governed enterprise data is becoming increasingly important for analytics, applications, AI, and agent-based use cases—and why adoption and reuse are critical measures of success.

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Additional Resources:

• To learn more about SAP Data and AI solutions, please check out SAP Business Data Cloud at https://www.sap.com/products/data-cloud.html

• And to engage further, please join our Data Professionals Community on https://community.sap.com/t5/data-professionals/gh-p/data-professionals

What does it really take to become a data-driven organization? In this episode of Let's Talk Data, host Corrie Birkeness is joined by data strategy expert Shelly McQuigg and SAP Product Marketing Director Kara Reed for a practical discussion on building a successful data strategy that delivers measurable business value. Together, they explore why effective data strategies must begin with business outcomes—not technology—and how trusted, governed data is the foundation for analytics and AI success.

Shelly and Kara share lessons from decades of experience leading enterprise data initiatives, including standardizing global KPIs, establishing executive sponsorship, and creating governance models that balance control with business agility. They explain why data professionals need both technical expertise and business knowledge to influence organizational change and drive adoption.

The conversation also examines how modern data architectures, including data fabric, enable organizations to create a single definition of the truth without physically centralizing data. Finally, the discussion turns to AI, highlighting why data quality, governance, and trusted information have become more critical than ever before. Whether you're a data leader, architect, analyst, or executive, this episode provides actionable guidance for creating a scalable data strategy that supports business growth, operational efficiency, and trusted AI initiatives.

Key Topics of Discussion:

• Building a business-first data strategy focused on corporate KPIs, measurable outcomes, and business value.

• The importance of data governance in creating trusted, standardized, and high-quality enterprise data.

• The evolving role of data professionals as business partners, strategists, and organizational influencers.

• Modern data architecture and data fabric, enabling a single definition of the truth across distributed systems.

• Preparing data for AI, emphasizing why governance, quality, and trusted data are essential for successful AI adoption.

Subscribe to The Let’s Talk Data Podcast

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

YouTube

Connect With Shelly McQuigg

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Connect With Kara Reed

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Connect With Corrie Birkeness

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Additional Resources:

To learn more about SAP Data and AI solutions, please check out SAP Business Data Cloud at https://www.sap.com/products/data-cloud.html

To engage further, please join our Data Professionals Community on https://community.sap.com/t5/data-professionals/gh-p/data-professionals