Identifying Integration Possibilities Between SAP Business Warehouse and SAP Business Data Cloud

Managing the current complex architecture of your data warehousing solution and your large volume of business data can be a challenge. At the same time, you want to preserve your business context and offer business users access to self-service data.

To make data easily accessible while keeping valuable semantics, a cloud-based, scalable, and cost-efficient data management solution that supports open standards is required.

Moreover, you want to leverage innovations, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), to automate and improve efficiency and unlock the full potential of your business data.

The answer is provided by the integration of SAP Business Warehouse with SAP Business Data Cloud: You will be able to leverage your SAP BW investment and use predefined Data Products and Insight Apps in SAP Business Data Cloud.

For example, you can use the machine learning capabilities of SAP Databricks on your SAP BW data and create new use cases with Data Products and Insight Apps while incorporating AI into these new scenarios.

There are three steps to your modernization path:

Let's look at these three steps in more details.

You can lift your existing SAP BW NetWeaver or SAP BW/4HANA on-premises deployment as-is into the private cloud component of SAP Business Data Cloud.

For SAP BW 7.5, the mainstream maintenance will then be extended to 2030 instead of 2027. This extension will give you more time to gradually shift to SAP Business Data Cloud without going to an intermediate solution (SAP BW/4HANA maintenance is planned until 2040).

If your SAP BW system is still on another database, a migration to SAP BW on HANA is required. 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.

You can take advantage of an SAP-managed environment, removing hardware maintenance and lowering the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

After lifting your SAP BW to the private cloud, you'll be able to use the Data Product Generator to push your data into SAP Business Data Cloud.

SAP Business Data Cloud will then consume your SAP BW InfoProviders through a Data Product created in the SAP Datasphere component of SAP Business Data Cloud.

You can keep your SAP BW investment and use cases as is, while the generated BW Data Products can be consumed in SAP Datasphere as any other Data Product. You could create new analytical scenarios by mixing the SAP data with some external data. Or you can share it with SAP Databricks for ML/AI scenarios.

Additionally, you can import SAP BW objects, such as queries and their dependencies, using the SAP BW/4HANA Model Transfer via Semantic Onboarding without extensive migration efforts. When onboarding to SAP Datasphere, the import automatically creates new entities based on SAP BW/4HANA objects and retrieves the respective semantics. With this approach, certain SAP BW investments can be moved to SAP Datasphere, replacing corresponding data flows with proven capabilities of SAP Datasphere while focusing on creating new use cases with Data Products in SAP Business Data Cloud.

Suppose you envision a decommissioning of your SAP BW systems, and the SAP BW investment can be covered within the scope of SAP BW Bridge. In that case, you can replace the SAP BW 7.5 or SAP BW/4HANA systems with the SAP BW Bridge via a tool-supported conversion. You can benefit from accessing S-API extractors and business content similarly to the SAP BW on-premises world, while moving SAP BW investments to SAP BW Bridge without recreating data models and their respective semantical definition. At the same time, you can adopt Data Products and Insight Apps with SAP Business Data Cloud.

You'll find more information on this topic in the Modernizing your Data Warehouse Landscape - From SAP BW to SAP Datasphere learning journey.

While shifting your SAP BW investment to SAP Business Data Cloud, you will be able to explore SAP-managed Data Products and Insight Apps to replace existing SAP BW scenarios and create new ones.

SAP-managed Data Products and Insight Apps allow you to consume and create analytic scenarios, following a clean core principle.

Leveraging SAP BW as Data Product while adopting SAP-managed Data Products and Insight Apps will enable you to decommission your SAP BW system over time. You will benefit from the open partner ecosystem for future innovations.

You can still implement your analytical use cases in SAP Datasphere in a similar manner as in SAP BW while getting the best of both worlds: keeping your SAP BW systems as is and a guided evolution process towards Data Products and Insight Apps, with all the semantically rich investments and corresponding business context in SAP Business Data Cloud.

You've now learned to leverage your SAP BW existing content while moving to SAP Business Data Cloud.