Data Warehouse Cloud

The future of data and analytics with SAP is in the cloud

DWC enables companies to focus entirely on their analytics activities. In addition, it is becoming apparent that future innovations and new functionalities will be rolled out in DWC. To ensure sustainable business success, three things are essential: agility, value creation and continuous innovation. For the IT infrastructure, this means creating the conditions for efficient data management and providing modern evaluation and analysis options - all the more so in view of the constantly increasing volumes of data in companies. Data warehouses have established themselves as platforms that collect, condense and secure data from a wide variety of sources and make it available for analysis.

Data Shopping

Against this background, the Data Warehouse Cloud (DWC), together with the Hana Cloud, the SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) and the Data Intelligence Cloud, forms SAP's data-to-value portfolio. Among other things, both cloud and on-premises data sources can be integrated. The Data Flow component also offers ETL functionalities for extracting data from a wide variety of sources, transforming it and finally storing it in local tables in the DWC. In addition, with the Data Builder and the Business Builder, there are two separate areas for data modeling in the DWC, and it also provides some business content data models that can be made available for standard use cases with just a few clicks.

With DWC, SAP is also attempting to take a decisive step in the direction of self-service data warehousing. Here, IT continues to have sovereignty and responsibility for uniform, standardized data models. At the same time, however, it receives support in data management, because the business department can take the final step toward reporting on its own and independently. If implemented correctly, this increases agility and accelerates analytics developments in companies. In terms of a "data shopping" experience, data is available to end users in a simple, guided form: Reusable analytic data models can answer various business questions. 

The openness of the application is based on the combination with the SAC as a so-called first-class consuming citizen. With just a few clicks, the connection between the DWC and the SAC is set up, which means that the data of the activated analytical data models of the DWC can subsequently be used via a live connection. Users can also access the data with third-party tools such as Tableau or Power BI. Last but not least, the DWC is to be established in the future as a central data hub for planning scenarios in combination with the SAC, including a retraction of forecast and plan data towards the DWC. In the long term, it should also be possible to use the DWC on all common hyperscalers.

Since SAP provides the DWC as SaaS, customers no longer have to worry about product updates and new releases themselves - at the same time, the automatic and central updating by SAP ensures permanent improvement and optimization of the product. The new Space-as-a-Service construct also makes isolated units or even separated logical layers in the DWC possible. Another interesting aspect: End users can independently create business entities for reporting with the help of the Business Builder. Through the link with SAC, the uniformity of user interface and usability of the two applications creates a perfect symbiosis. Therefore, SAC is the front-end tool of choice for consuming DWC data models.

Qunis advised and supported customers in the implementation of SAP DWC as part of the SAP 2021 Early Adopter Care Program. It was found that the lean and efficient modeling using SQL or SQLScript saved development time and at the same time improved performance. Despite the weaknesses that still existed at the time, the speed with which SAP was equipping the application with new features and eliminating errors meant that a positive development of the application was foreseeable. Many of the familiar functionalities from the classic SAP Data Warehouse will probably also be found in the DWC in the future - in a familiar or modified form. In the medium term, SAP DWC will be SAP's data warehousing tool with the highest priority.