The BW Quarter Roadmap

At a small, intimate event in San Francisco, USA, the two SAP Executive Board members Bernd Leukert and Robert Enslin presented a new Business Warehouse.

The old BW on AnyDB including Hana was not bad, but SAP does not want to give its existing customers time to consolidate.

It is obviously easy for SAP to throw a new technology with a new paradigm onto the market.

Existing customers are less pleased about the "innovative strength". They do not want to make SAP administration and release changes their core competence.

If SAP were to take things a little easier, many existing customers would be delighted. It was therefore not surprising that on the same day as the announcement of BW/4 (BW quarter), the German-speaking SAP user group (DSAG) asked: SAP Business Warehouse on the brink of extinction?

At the beginning of September, SAP presented the BW/4 Hana product as the successor to SAP Business Warehouse in a press release.

DSAG welcomes the fact that SAP is using innovative technologies to equip itself and its existing customers for the digital age. Nevertheless, questions about the further development of the existing BW product, which is an integral part of the software landscape for many DSAG members, remain unanswered at present.

DSAG therefore expects prompt answers from SAP on how to proceed with BW. In this context, DSAG is continuing to campaign for existing customers to be able to expect corresponding further development of existing solutions for their regular software maintenance and servicing fees in the future and not for the majority of resources to flow exclusively into new products - as the announcement suggests.

Modernization

SAP is modernizing data warehousing with the introduction of BW/4 on Hana and wants to make the Hana platform more future-proof. In addition to the traditional local installation, the new solution will soon be available via Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the Hana Enterprise Cloud (HEC).

This should enable existing customers to modernize their DW (data warehousing) environments in an uncomplicated way and move their digital business processes to the cloud more quickly.

To address the need for open, scalable IT systems, BW Quarter offers an open DW architecture for application development, complex multi-temperature data management and support for cloud-enabled offerings such as AWS and HEC, with more third-party cloud platforms to follow. Business applications such as solutions based on S/4 Hana can use a pre-configured data warehouse or a standard SQL-based development environment.

At the presentation in California, USA, SAP Chief Technology Officer Bernd Leukert particularly emphasized that an end-to-end platform for executing digital business processes via automatically generated views in Hana, in which SQL data logic is merged with application data directly from Hana, is now available.

Furthermore, the automatic distribution of multi-temperature data results in reduced costs for data management and storage.

To provide existing customers with a relatively affordable DW system, BW Quarter can be implemented for AWS and HEC without further configuration steps, with additional options for cloud deployment to follow.

In addition, BW/4 enables a seamless connection to the BusinessObjects Cloud solution, creating an environment for visualization, storytelling and data analysis. Accordingly, BW Quarter is fully connected to SAP's Digital Boardroom.

At the same time as the introduction of SAP BW/4, a new certification for the storage-optimized X1 instances of AWS was issued.

It covers implementations for horizontal scaling up to seven nodes with a total of 14 TB of storage. This makes BW Quarter a platform for customers who want to deploy data loads in Hana on AWS.

Peter DeSantis, Vice President, Compute Services, AWS:

"BW/4 Hana and AWS give customers the ability to run SAP's modernized data warehouse for real-time analytics with the elasticity, flexibility and reliability of the AWS cloud"

"AWS X1 instances offer more storage than any other SAP-certified cloud instance currently available.

And they are specifically tailored for customers who want to test, deploy, process and optimize their workloads in Hana at scale without investing in on-premise infrastructure."