Integrating SAP Business Warehouse with SAP Business Data Cloud

Many SAP customers have developed enterprise data warehouses using SAP BW. These data warehouses contain high-value, trusted data from all business processes. A lot of time and money has been invested over many years, developing these sophisticated data warehouses that have become mission-critical. Now, customers want to use their valuable SAP BW data in SAP Business Data Cloud for machine learning and to develop AI models. This is possible by integrating SAP BW with SAP Business Data Cloud.

After integrating SAP BW with SAP Business Data Cloud, you can generate custom data products from the SAP BW InfoProviders, such as CompositeProviders and DataStore Objects. These custom data products can then be shared to SAP Databricks for machine learning and building AI models. The custom data products could also be shared with SAP Datasphere to develop new data models that combine standard data products.

Once integrated in SAP Business Cloud, customers can continue to operate their SAP BW solution to support existing use-cases using the legacy data flows, data models and queries.

Integrating an existing SAP BW solution with SAP Business Data Cloud provides a path for the modernization of SAP BW.

There are three key steps to integrate SAP BW into an SAP Business Data Cloud landscape. The three steps are lift, shift and innovate.

Let's look at the three steps in detail.

The first step is to lift your existing SAP BW or SAP BW/4HANA on-premise deployment to the private cloud component of SAP Business Data Cloud.

One of the advantages of lifting to the private cloud is that your SAP BW 7.5 mainstream maintenance is then extended to 2030, instead of 2027. After lifting to the private cloud, SAP BW/4HANA maintenance is currently planned until 2040. This gives extra time to consider the role of SAP BW and SAP BW/4HANA going forward.

If your SAP BW on-premise system is still on a non-SAP HANA database, a migration to SAP BW on HANA is required before you can lift to the cloud. Optionally, you can execute a conversion to SAP BW/4HANA, either during the move to the cloud, or at any point while SAP BW NetWeaver is still supported.

After lifting to the cloud, you can then take advantage of an SAP-managed environment, removing hardware maintenance and lowering the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

Once your SAP BW has been lifted to the private cloud, you will be able to use the Data Product Generator tool to expose BW data as custom data products in SAP Business Data Cloud from your InfoProviders.

You can keep your SAP BW use-cases as they are, while the generated SAP BW data products can be consumed in SAP Datasphere. You can create new analytical scenarios by enriching the SAP BW data products with third party data. Or you can share SAP BW data with SAP Databricks for machine learning and AI scenarios.

After shifting your SAP BW investment to SAP Business Data Cloud, you will be able to explore SAP-managed data products and Intelligent Applications to determine if they could replace existing SAP BW scenarios.

Generating and using custom generated data products from your BW data, while increasingly adopting SAP-managed data products and Intelligent Applications, will enable you to decommission your SAP BW system over time.