SAP has been dealing with questions over the future of its Business Warehouse product for years, and now has provided an answer with SAP BW/4HANA, a new data warehousing product that takes some significant technical leaps forward.
Two things immediately stand out about the launch. First, it wasn't a pre-announcement: SAP BW/4HANA will be released to customers on Sept. 7. Secondly, many of its planned killer features are available in version 1.0, meaning customers immediately have a clear path forward in terms of planning their road map, as HANA expert John Appleby of IT consultancy Bluefin Solutions notes in an extensive BW/4HANA FAQ.
Secondly, SAP is making BW/4HANA immediately available on Amazon Web Services as well as SAP's HANA Enterprise Cloud, with more to come. Its announcement placed emphasis on the cloud deployment options, although an on-premises version will also be available.
About those killer features? Here is a sampling from SAP's press release:
SAP BW/4HANA intends to deliver on SAP’s vision of a next-generation data warehouse that will significantly reduce data movement and duplication by analyzing data wherever it resides, whether in data lakes with the SAP HANA Vora engine or in legacy systems within or outside the enterprise.
It will also integrate live streaming and time-series sensor data collected from Internet of Things environments via smart data streaming, an event stream processing option in SAP HANA. These advanced approaches will provide unprecedented flexibility, real-time performance and the ability to overcome the challenges of data silos from highly distributed data sources.
With the addition of sophisticated hot, warm or cold data temperature management and compression, enterprises can ensure all data is primed to drive rapid results at much lower storage costs.
A Great Leap Forward
There's plenty more to chew on in the release and Appleby's FAQ, the richness of which benefits from the fact Bluefin has been working closely with SAP and early BW/4HANA customers over the past several months.
A number of years ago, SAP released BW on HANA, which allowed BW to use HANA as an underlying data store. BW/4HANA represents a much more ambitious effort. One might even say it represents "the end of the data warehouse as we know it," says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller.
As with SAP's next-generation S/4HANA ERP suite, BW/4HANA runs only on HANA. That's a departure from BW, which runs on Oracle, SQL Server, Sybase, DB/2 and others. SAP will support the latest BW version for some years, but sooner than later customers who want to continue with SAP as their strategic data warehouse will have to consider a switch to BW/4HANA.
There are some compelling reasons they should, says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Doug Henschen.
"As a logical data warehouse, BW/4HANA promises to support a wide range of use cases in terms of latency and scale, from Hana’s trademark real-time, in-memory query speeds to querying long-term histories and archival data that might be stored on Hadoop," he says. "Older data can go to the less-expensive storage tiers, yet it’s all a part of the same logical data warehouse. Flexible cloud deployment and management is also a key appeal, with hybrid deployment options and modeling and management tools exposed through web-based interfaces."
That said, "no doubt there’s more to this story coming in the weeks ahead," Henschen adds. "For example, there are strong indications that SAP intends to deliver its own Hadoop and Spark services. Such services would go hand-in-hand with the BW/4HANA promise to support a range of analytical workload, latency and scale requirements. The likes of Oracle, Teradata and IBM have already delivered ways to query across their databases and Hadoop simultaneously, and they’re increasingly providing hybrid deployment options including cloud services. But if SAP BW/4HANA can combine seamless, real-time integration with SAP apps, HANA performance and new levels of scale and deployment flexibility, it’s something that SAP customers will have to give serious consideration."
SAP wil reveal more details of BW/4HANA during a launch event Sept. 7, as well as at the TechEd conference on Sept. 19.
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