Recently there has been a lot of excitement around the idea of a stand-alone metrics layer in the modern data stack. Traditionally, metrics have been defined in the BI or analytics layer where various dashboards are used to look at business metrics like Revenue, Sales Pipeline, numbers of Claims, or User Activity. Given that most organizations end up with multiple BI/Analytics tools, the idea has a lot of merits.

Google Cloud has a genuine passion for solving technology problems that make a difference for our customers. With the release of our BigQuery Connector for SAP, we're taking a another big step towards solving a major challenge for SAP customers with a quick, easy, and inexpensive way to integrate SAP data with BigQuery, our serverless, highly scalable, and cost-effective multi cloud data warehouse designed for business agility.

Read any overview of how the finance and accounting function is changing, and you will notice several common themes. Three of the most important of these are: cloud migration, data standardization, and interoperability. The aim of technology in finance is to remove friction. With cloud migration that means making upgrades, licensing, procurement and maintenance simpler with software-as-a-service (SaaS) models.

If a tree falls in a forest and there’s no one to hear it… well, it's very hard to use that tree in your corporate decision-making. KPIs (key performance indicators) are the metrics that tell you how well you're performing against certain key strategic targets. Ongoing KPI reporting gives you a clear and consistent view into your company’s performance in the areas that matter most.