What will compliment HANA in the future...

[Former Member]

I'm in a little dilemma. My team was going for training and get on projects for HANA. But it seems that has been postponed for alteast a year. It was disappointing to hear this.

I'm a BI developer, working with basic ETL, Infocubes, DSO, etc. (only 1 year experience, was ABAP developer before)

I do have somewhat of a flexibility to learn something new (I'm still new to BI, so I have that option).

I want to learn something that will compliment HANA when I get involved in it in the future. I know HANA will be replacing many things in BI. There aren't that many options (BusinessObjects, BWA, BEX, stick with BI (ETL/DSO/InfoCubes/etc.).

What would be the best application/product to learn in BI now that will definitely help/compliment when learning HANA in the future? (which will also improve my skill set and value as a consultant also)

[Former Member]

Thanks Divya and Lars.

I used to be an ABAP programmer and did alot of reporting so I'm hoping BO won't be that difficult to grasp.

But within BO, there are so many different applications/tools:

1) Crystal Reports...So I'm assuming learning BO consists of learning Crystal Reports. (they are the same thing..?)

2) Web Intelligence

3) DeskI

4) Xcelsius

5) Universe Designer

6) Enterprise Information Management (EIM)

7) Enterprise Performance Management (EPM)

😎 InfoView web portal

9) On-demand BI software

I'm little overwhelmed with this. Which is the most popular and in demand? And which is most complimentary to HANA?

Sorry again if my questions seem to basic, but I need to make a career decision on what to learn that'll be in demand around the globe.

[Vitaliy-R]

if you were a developer and feel strong in SQL, then I think best for you would be to look at new HANA programming languages - SQLScript and L. In my opinion these should be most HANA-specific skills in demand.

On the other hand - BO is more universal skill, not HANA specific, and - as mentioned earlier - is just an umbrella for a set of disciplines and tools. With your background BO Data Integrator sounds like most probable path.

Good luck.

[lbreddemann]

Just a general remark on this, as I believe many customers are thinking about the best ways to adopt HANA.

With BW 7.3 SPS 5 it's possible to run BW natively on a HANA system. This includes changed implementations for different key features of SAP BW (e.g. flat infocubes, in-memory DSO, exception aggregation and de-aggregation pushed to the HANA level etc.).

So it's possible to take the existing BW warehouse and reporting system and run it on HANA.

Step by step the adoption of the new HANA features can then be done.

And, often overlooked, HANA is not a data warehouse. It doesn't integrate data sources across the companies data world.

It's doesn't keep historical data stored in data marts in a cleansed and unified way.

SAP BW does all this - also when it runs on HANA.

So, in my view, it might be a clever strategy to focus on the design of the current data warehouse so that it's easy to move it to HANA.

ok - just my 2ct

Lars

[Former Member]

Sorry, I'm still weak in BI terminology.

SBO means business objects like Crystal Reporting, xcelsius, etc? Can you please give little more detail.

I don't know much about SBO DS, can you expand on that?

Also, one random question. Is Bex query designer needed when reporting in Excel via HANA? Can data be extracted in Excel directly from HANA (without query designer)? What is a good practice for this?

Thanks.

[Former Member]

Like you said SBO stands for SAP Business Objects and DS stands for Data Services (the Business Objects ETL tool).

There is no query designer (like Bex Query Designer is for BW) for HANA. Calculation view or Analytical Views are exposes directly to reporting tools or Excel. The analysis is performed directly on top of Calculation/Analytical Views if you are using Analysis for Office or thru Universe if you are using WebI.

Yes, data can be extracted from HANA thru MS Excel using ODBO drivers. However functionality will limited pretty much to Excel usage of tool. One interesting thing though MS Excel can display hierarchy build in HANA however none of Business Object Tools can currently display hierarchy build in HANA so far.

[Vitaliy-R]

1. SBO BI

2. SBO DS

3. BW

In order of integration.