Impact of SAP HANA to the future of SAP BW - will it become obsolete?

[Former Member]

Hello,

I have heard rumors that BW will become increasingly obsolete or replaced by SAP HANA as it enables reporting functionality to be moved to the source system(s).

What are your ideas or information about this?

I hope this thread is not rejected again. It was already rejected under Business Intelligence and I was told to move it to BW.

Thomas Wagner

[former_member184884 · Accepted solution]

Hi Thomas,

Good Day...

I am one like you freaked with same question but 2 days back i was been part of SAP workshop there i met so many distinguished peoples who have shared ample knowledge regarding BW on HANA.

obviously same questions raised from the delegates including me.although I've some info but i'm lacking clarity on this like you. below are few things which i would like to share with you.

SAP has there own plans when comes to BW & HANA, though they came with HANA studio has modeling tool but its meant for customers who have not implemented BW for there organization and even if you have already BW in place,you can use HANA studio to achieve for real time data visibility it all depends on how you use the tools.

One more thing i would like to share with you BW will never be obsolete at-least in the near future because there are 16K+(correct if i am wrong) installations worldwide so you cannot replace with HANA studio overnight!!!

you might have seen developments,new features & releases coming in the BW space with this we can say SAP don't have intention to isolate BW from there business suite. but they are leveraging new features more specific to HANA.(like LSA++ and all)

one simple info i would like to share with you currently i am working for one of the worlds big FMCG company where for one region BW version is 3.0 we've proposed many times for the client to update there version but they are declining our proposals shocking thing is they are paying ransom money every year for there support to SAP since this version is not supporting any more officially.

so with this we can say what is the clients tendency(not all) towards for new versions if we think in there perspective they should have minimal downtime & zero interruption on business for any upgrade/installation activity.

Hope now you got clear idea..

Thanks & Regards,

Harish

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hello Harish,

Thanks for the information.

Thomas

[Former Member]

I am currently in a partner test for SAP Lumira and its extensions. It seems that this tool can easily report on any HANA database (and more) without the need for a BW.

Thomas

[former_member184884]

Hi Thomas,

i heard lot about SAP Lumira can you please enlighten us in this regard!!

Regards,

Harish

[Former Member]

I would go to https://www.cloud.saplumira.com for a start and create a free one-user demo-account. Then you can use Excel- and csv-files as data source and create a visualization within minutes. That is totally easy to do and explains more than a thousand words. Today during the test we had the full version which is able to use the HANA database as source.

Thomas

[former_member184884]

Thanks for your quick revert

[Former Member]

Hi Thomas,

Good topic! As Harish and Jürgen I found very interesting and I am also trying to understand the whole scenario.

We have plenty points to discuss here. From conceptual perspective – the meaning of star schema (cubes) was to gain performance what is the point to have cubes if you have in-memory? – to business perspective where a system will become obsolete naturally with new technologies.

In my opinion, I wrote a post at Linkedin, where I say: BW is Romario! See below what exactly I mean:

SAP BW and Football

Years ago one of the greatest football players of all time was struggling to end his career. He was playing and not scoring goals as from his time playing for Barcelona and PSV. Romario was called by the Brazilian press a ‘Former Player in Activity’. Finally Romario decided to be ‘only’ a former great player and enjoy his retirement.

From football to SAP Arena: is SAP BW a ‘Former Player in Activity’? Will SAP BW ‘score goals’ as in its best moments? Will, in 10 years time, SAP BW be a picture hanging in the ‘Hall of Fame’?

We have fast players now. Neymar ‘Hana’ is playing.

Kind Regards,

Gilson

[Former Member]

Hello Gilson,

Very interesting perspective. I also like soccer.

Thomas

[former_member184884]

Nice comparison gilson although I don't have knowledge on football but sounds good!!! If possible please share linked in blog link I'm curious to read your blog. -Harish

[Former Member]

Thanks Thomas and Harish.

Harish I thought about you but, sorry, no idea about cricket!

It was not in a blog. I posted it on Linkedin:

SAP BW and Football | Gilson Teixeira | LinkedIn

Kind Regards,

Gilson

[former_member184884]

Thanks gilson

[Former Member]

Great example you have written there..... Neymar HANA...lol

[Former Member]

Hi Thomas,

I heard these rumours too. The first step was to replace a relatiobal database with SAP HANA, which you can now use in SAP BW 7.4 SP5 and above. It's a nver-ending story, this rumour came up with the birth of HANA.

A DataWarehouse is for me more than a huge and fast data storage and retrieval. It should also do data harmonization, data integrationfrom, data staging and transforming business logic.

.

The general rule for all applications is still the MVC modell. The controller is in this case HANA, the views are the different reports using different tools like BEX, Crystal, Dashboards, etc. HANA is then the part where the business logic and transformations are done. But you still need a BW to set up your data modell and the relations between the different InfoProviders. So BW is in this model the place for the modelling.

Some people say just pull all tables of your ERP into HANA and you can build the reports you need.

Yes, you can. But you have also to rebuild the relations and dependencies of these tables in HANA, which makes it really redundant to keep the logical relations on both, on ERP and on HANA.

For me, it makes sense to replace a relational database by HANA. Evn transfer the calculation of the business logic to HANA. Let HANA do the calculations and returning the correct results. But the data modelling and data staging (the description of the single steps) will still be done in a BW.

Another question for me is a multi-system landscape. As far as I know each system can only be connected to one HANA instance. What do you do in mutli-national company, having different source systems. IT makes definitely no sense to have multiple HANA instances. There you still need a BW for integrating and harmonizing the data of the sources. But only from modelling view. The data itself will be stored in HANA.

Regards,

Jürgen

[Former Member]

Hello Jürgen,

Thanks for the information.

Thomas