Large enterprises face significant challenges when integrating confidential data across heterogeneous systems and cloud platforms. Despite the critical importance of this data for business insights, planning, and decision-making, accessing it through third-party applications creates substantial technical hurdles. SAP OData services have emerged as a pivotal solution, providing standardized access to SAP business data across diverse consumption scenarios. This article examines how OData services democratize SAP data access through web standards, reduce integration complexity via self-describing APIs, and enable modern user experience development. The architectural alignment with SAP’s application layer, performance optimization techniques, and implementation benefits are presented, highlighting OData’s role in facilitating real-time data integration between SAP HANA and cloud platforms. The evidence from production environments demonstrates the effectiveness of this approach across multiple industries, particularly for mobile application integration where it eliminates traditional SAP GUI dependencies while ensuring security and performance at scale.
Keywords: OData protocol, SAP HANA, cloud platforms, enterprise integration, mobile application architecture
