For modernizing your SAP BW landscape into the SAP Business Data Cloud, we recommend a clear, structured three-step approach: "Lift – Shift – Innovate". This ensures that existing BW investments are preserved while taking full advantage of a modern, flexible cloud platform.
To facilitate it, SAP provides several tools. Especially, within SAP BW, a new data product generator (DPG) is offered.
With the introduction of SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC), customers benefit from SAP-managed data products and intelligent applications. It is now easier to combine different BDC components.
You can continue to use existing BW data flows and InfoProviders and create new ones. Then, the corresponding data set can be replicated to SAP Datasphere object store. After generating Data products there, you can consume them without further replication in SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) or SAP Databricks. In SAP Databricks, you can create machine learning and AI based scenarios and store the result set as Data procucts in SAP Databricks. Without further replication, these data products can be consumed in SAP Datasphere.
You benefit from the following strategic, technical, and operational advantages of the steps in the lift - shift - innovate approach to integrate BW into SAP Business Data Cloud:
Lifting to the private cloud is a prerequisite for using SAP BW within SAP Business Data Cloud. Moreover, SAP offers long-term mainstream maintenance:
- SAP BW 7.5 is supported within SAP BDC until end of 2030
- SAP BW/4HANA is supported until 2040.
Commercial transition between different components is easy because purchased capacity units can be used for different BDC components.
Upscaling and downscaling is possible. (Scale-out is not possible.)
SAP SEM-BCS is available as add-on in SAP BW 7.5, while SAP S/4HANA Group Reporting can be leveraged in the context of SAP BW/4HANA.
By Shifting to data products within SAP Business Data Cloud, you integrate your data with SAP Datasphere, the strategic data warehouse solution of SAP. Moreover, the replication of your data set to the object store is the prerequisite to share the data with SAP Databricks for machine learning and AI use cases.
With the Innovation step, you follow a clean core principle. So, you profit from SAP standard solutions and avoid issues with the next software updates.
Let's now have a closer look at what you need to do.
Lifting SAP BW to the cloud (PCE) means moving from SAP BW or BW/4HANA on premise to private cloud edition. This means, SAP holistically manages the environment. You can continue with the existing BW objects and loading mechanisms and you are enabled to leverage BW data as a BW based custom data product.
Organizations having completed the LIFT step benefit from reduced hardware and maintenance costs and thus reduced total costs of ownership.
Shifting to SAP Business Data Cloud means generating data products and data subscriptions and sharing them with third party tools for machine learning and AI use cases. These subscriptions replicate your SAP BW data to the SAP BW based custom data products which are directly accessible via the object store of SAP Datasphere. By creating views, you can integrate SAP BW based data products (legacy scenarios) with SAP managed data products (innovation scenarios). By sharing SAP BW based custom data products with other solutions, such as SAP Databricks, you can leverage your datasets for AI and ML scenarios.
Organizations having completed the SHIFT step benefit from the open partner ecosystem and create ML/AI use cases using BW data products.
Innovating means buliding new innovatoins within SAP Business Data Cloud and the open partner ecosystem and replacing SAP BW workwflows with SAP managed data products and intelligent applications.
Organizations having completet the INNOVATE step benefit from the latest release with minimal modifications and cloud-compliant extensions and customizations, following an SAP ERP clean core strategy.
With RISE, SAP offers to transform on-premises SAP ERP systems to the private cloud, modernize business processes, and become more agile in the cloud. That is also beneficial for the SAP BW journey with SAP.
Summary: While adopting to SAP BW data products and resulting use cases, customers can move SAP BW workflows from a customer-managed, centralized on-premise data warehouse to a lakehouse architecture, leveraging Data Products and Intelligent Application offered within SAP BDC, enabling customers to follow a clean core principle for SAP BW and moving away from customization.
Let's first have a closer look at the LIFT phase:
The requirement for including SAP BW in SAP Business Data Cloud is SAP HANA database. Therefore, start by migrating from SAP BW on any DB to SAP BW on HANA if required.
Optionally, execute a conversion to SAP BW/4HANA (as a shell or remote conversion) either before lifting to the private cloud, during the move to the cloud, or at any point after lifting while SAP BW NetWeaver is still supported.
For the conversion project, use tool support and support from SAP experts.
- System readiness check
- Pre-check tool for custom code and Bex queries.
- BW/4HANA Conversion Cockpit
If customers want an in-place conversion, then move SAP Netweaver BW 7.5 to SAP BW/4HANA On-Premise first and then lift to SAP BW/4HANA Private Cloud edition afterwards.
Let's now have a closer look at the SHIFT phase:
In the shift step, create custom data products based on selected InfoProviders or InfoObjects using a tool called Data Product Generator. This tool allows you to create a subscription on SAP BW data to store your data in a lakehouse architecture.
This tool is accessible via the following UI in the SAP BW system:
- In the SAP Netweaver BW 7.5 system, from SAP GUI transaction RSDPS.
- In SAP BW/4HANA, from BW cockpit, data subscription app.
- In SAP BW/4HANA, from BW modeling tools using the subscription generator.
The result set is a delta table in SAP Datasphere's object store. You can find the corresponding local table (file) in the corresponding target space in SAP Datasphere and use the data builder to create additional Datasphere entities on top of it.
Note
When your BW system is SAP BW/4HANA, you use the Data Subscription app in the BW cockpit to generate a subscription to replicate the data to SAP Datasphere's object store. A subscription can be scheduled in a process chain.
To restrict the data to the relevant content, define settings of a data subscription. You can define projections to exclude columns. With execution mode set to Delta you ignore already replicated BW requests. Moreover, you can define selections based on a filter condition to exclude rows.
Let's finally have a closer look at the INNOVATE phase:
In the innovation step, explore what is possible with SAP-managed data products and intelligent applications following a clean core approach. Move heavily customized data models to SAP Datasphere until end of maintenance. Replace created BW based custom data products by SAP data products. Then, replace customer-defined SAC models with intelligent applications. Finally, after some time, decommission the SAP Business Warehouse system.
Refer to the following references find out more about the lift - shift - innovate approach, and especially the Data Product Generator: