Motivation to Modernize SAP BW with SAP BDC
Integrating an existing SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW) solution with SAP BDC provides a path for the modernization of SAP BW.
Many SAP customers have developed sophisticated enterprise data warehouses using SAP BW. These data warehouses contain high-value, trusted data from all business processes. A lot of effort and financial resources have been invested over many years developing these SAP BW-based data warehouses that support mission-critical applications. Customers now want to use their valuable SAP BW data in SAP BDC for machine learning and to develop AI models. This is possible by integrating SAP BW with SAP BDC.
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After integrating SAP BW with SAP BDC, you can generate custom data products from SAP BW InfoProviders, such as CompositeProviders and DataStore Objects. SAP BDC includes the tools to generate data products from SAP BW data.
BW-generated data products can be shared with SAP Databricks and SAP Snowflake and other data platforms for machine learning, building AI agents and developing analytical applications. BW-generated data products can also be shared with SAP Datasphere to develop new data models that combine standard data products with custom data products from non-SAP applications.
The data storage technology for BW-generated data products in SAP BDC is based on a modern lakehouse architecture. A lakehouse architecture provides data storage at scale using hyperscalers for cost-efficient storage. This means SAP BW customers can immediately reduce data storage costs by moving their SAP BW data to SAP BDC data products.
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One of the advantages of integrating SAP BW with SAP BDC is that mainstream maintenance for SAP BW 7.5 is then extended to 2030, instead of 2027. For SAP BW/4HANA, maintenance is extended until 2040. These maintenance extensions give customers extra time to consider the role of SAP BW and SAP BW/4HANA going forward.
Once integrated in SAP BDC, as well as being used to generate new data products, SAP BW continues to run as before to support existing use-cases using the legacy data flows, data models and queries.
The Path to Modernization
The path to modernization of SAP BW begins by lifting your existing SAP BW or SAP BW/4HANA on-premise deployment to the private cloud component of SAP BDC.
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Lifting your SAP BW deployment to the private cloud means that SAP take over the provisioning and management of the infrastructure. Your IT teams can then focus on the higher value tasks.
Once SAP BW has been lifted to the private cloud of SAP BDC you can generate data products from your SAP BW InfoProviders.
SAP BW-generated data products can be combined with SAP-delivered data products and other custom data products developed by the customer from non-SAP sources. The data modeling tools of SAP Datasphere are used to build new data models that unify the data products. SAP Analytics Cloud is then used to build the custom analytical applications on top of the data models.
Continued Innovation
A key benefit of modernizing SAP BW with SAP BDC is that customers can reuse their investments in SAP BW and slowly transition their SAP BW workloads to a more modern data platform that is based around a data product economy.
The long-term goal is for the complete decommissioning of SAP BW but this is done at the customer's pace.