SAP Business Warehouse Through BW/4HANA: A Brief History
One of the things that business people think about is how to learn from data. Extracting helpful insight from data is rewarding but not straightforward. We all want to create an environment where decision-makers and action takers can quickly and easily get to the results they want without spending time. That was the idea when SAP introduced the first version of BW in 1998. It didn’t change much over time, but it is becoming more important every passing day.
Progress on reporting capabilities of BW has changed a lot over time. SAP and developing technology have brought us to a new world, from challenges due to hardware limits to super-fast in-memory computing.
SAP introduced its next-generation data warehouse solution BW4HANA 1.0 in 2016 as a new family member, and it keeps going to develop and updating with newer versions.
What is in it for me?
It provides a simple set of objects that is well suited for modelling an agile and flexible layered architecture of a modern data warehouse.
SAP BW/4HANA manages all sorts of data, whether from SAP applications or other systems, structured or unstructured, and allows accessing of all models through an open SQL interface.
SAP BW/4HANA comes with state of the art user interfaces for administrators, developers, and end-users and, ultimately, SAP HANA-optimized processes that let you leverage vast amounts of data in real-time for competitive advantage.
The main features of SAP BW are still there, and the switch to SAP BW/4HANA is similar to the switch from SAP Business Suite to SAP S/4HANA. As part of this change, SAP BW/4HANA will store and manage a lot less data than it does now. All future innovations will take place in SAP BW/4HANA.
Prior releases of SAP BW powered by SAP HANA moved into maintenance, receiving little development or new functionality.
What are the essential things SAP BW/4HANA has to offer?
SAP BW/4HANA is helpful to businesses in three main ways:
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Business Agility:
A simplified warehouse that allows customers to do more than collect data; they can connect to it. Users of SAP BW/4HANA can benefit from better modelling, a much simpler set of data warehouse objects, and more accessible governance. Users can use SAP BW/4HANA modelling objects to automatically create HANA views that can be used by any SQL tool and viewed with SAP BusinessObjects Cloud or Lumira. It makes it possible to build an agile data warehouse, which gives better real-time business insights faster and for less money than before.
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Cloud-Ready:
Out-of-the-box deployment to HANA Enterprise Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Microsoft Azure (with other cloud deployment options coming soon) adds elasticity and more price/performance options, giving SAP BW/4HANA customers the most flexible landscape management solution on the market.
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Foundation for the next generation of warehouses:
End users can take care of themselves and find data resources quickly and easily. SAP BW/4HANA moves SAP’s vision of the Modern Data Warehouse forward to handle new types and locations of data from SAP applications or anywhere else. SAP BW/4HANA also supports the trend of analysing data in its original place to avoid moving and duplicating data as little as possible. It includes data lakes and data that is already in motion. It gives you flexibility in real-time and solves the problem of data silos. The addition of sophisticated data temperature management and compression makes sure that data is tuned for both results and cost.
You may visit Notium’s SAP BW4HANA page to find out more about what SAP BW4/HANA offers and the key benefits of the application.
