SAP is committed to innovate and provide industry leading data warehousing technologies to enable the Intelligent Enterprise. SAP Data Warehousing provides continuous innovations in SAP Datasphere and SAP BW/4HANA.
SAP Datasphere is the latest innovation in the data warehousing portfolio of SAP. It is based on the SAP HANA Cloud and follows a clear DWaaS (Data Warehouse as a Service) approach in the public cloud with very fast release cycles. The following are characteristics of SAP Datasphere.
Typical SAP Datasphere use cases are extending existing on-premise data warehouses by enhancing existing on-premise data with cloud sources to define new data models for broader insights. Another flavor is providing flexible data marts in control of business users to create new and agile models based on different sources and take the burden from the IT departments. In addition, there are tools available to connect data without duplication across business applications to provide a new and consistent view of the data.
SAP BW/4HANA is SAP's strategic solution for on premises or private cloud deployment. Customers with SAP BW as strategic asset will benefit from future improvements and investment protection until 2040 at least. SAP Business Warehouse (BW) has been available since 1998 and is in use by a large customer base. It represents an integrated data warehouse application that provides pre-defined content (LoB and industry-specific), tools, and processes to design and operate an enterprise data warehouse end-to-end. This approach simplifies development, administration, and user interface of your data warehouse, resulting in enhanced business agility for building a data warehouse in a standardized way. SAP BW/4HANA was published in 2016 as the logical successor of SAP BW with a strong focus on the integration of existing SAP ABAP application components into the SAP HANA Cloud. It follows a simplified data warehouse approach, with agile and flexible data modeling, SAP HANA-optimized processes, and user-friendly interfaces.
Data Warehousing Strategy of SAP
SAP follows a clear strategy towards data warehousing in the cloud. However, customers are not forced to follow this paradigm in a short period of time. Instead, SAP ensures full flexibility to gradually extend current investments and move at each customer´s own pace. This path includes the following steps:
- In the first step, customers can safeguard investments by lifting an existing landscape to a private cloud environment.
- In a second step, SAP offers approaches to combine the strengths of SAP BW/4HANA with the innovation, openness, and self-service abilities of SAP Datasphere in a hybrid scenario (see (1) above).
- The next step is based on the SAP BW Bridge, a new SAP Datasphere component, which was released at the end of 2021. The BW Bridge enables organizations to re-use standard extractors for SAP´s on-premise sources and leverage SAP´s business content to stage the data including ABAP logic to share it with SAP Datasphere (see (2) above).
- Finally, SAP provides a tool support to migrate SAP BW 7.x and SAP BW/4HANA applications one by one to the BW Bridge above).
