Hi All,

In this Article I would like to share with you my thoughts about the uncertainty future of SAP BW

We all know the history of why SAP acquired Business Objects as the front end tool for BI reports.

In the last year SAP went out the market with new solutions that keep’s our SAP BW community uncertainty about the future of SAP BW, these are my thoughts.

1.the new SAP HANA solution for In Memory reporting/computing  - we all know that the classic solution for heavy reporting  is the Data warehouse/ BW , it is used for  management reports and also sometime the BW acts as transaction reporting system . This was ok because as we know the information was generated on a different system (BW) and not on the SAP ECC so performance was ok, before HANA there was the BW accelerator –which is much different from HANA, the BWA solution came to the market for 2 reasons as I saw it

1.SAP BW wasn't build  that good for performance  of millions of records (in the latest version of BW the system performance got better , SAP improved the extraction  methods  and improved the table indexes ) , there was also uncertainty about the future of SAP BW back then , but as opposed to HANA the  BWA was over  the BW system, the HANA solution is over the SAP ECC system , which really brings us to the question that if customers will run all of his data in HANA , why would they need to use the BW ?  one can say that it will replace the transactional reports, but lately I was doing several of HANA courses and I was amazed to see that SAP delivers with HANA a set of “HANA Business Content” that delivers within  Business objects suite Dashboards(Xcelsius), web intelligence and even crystal reports  for several of SAP modules exactly as BW business content ,As opposed to BWA which was expansive , the HANA solution is going to be according to SAP to run on  every SAP installation,  it’s for the mass, SAP  also sells it as RDS (Rapid Deployment System ) fast and thin deployments . , so is our future is to become a HANA consultants & BO front end developers? I already see the struggle whether the HANA solution belongs to BASIS since it requires deep SQL knowledge or will it be for SAP consultants to be implemented?

2. I saw that SAP got tremendous fight from Qlicktech BI solution that was running In memory and is fast of implementation even over SAP ECC

I struggle to see the BW future within the HANA world, I also see lots of questions about it in the Different types of SAP and Linkedin forums, the BW Community is really confused.

2.SAP Business Objects- ETL data services

As we all know that in the classic DW there are 3 layers – the DW data base, the ETL tool , and the front end  tool , up until know the SAP BW delivered it all . SAP continued to develop the Business Objects ETL tool- the Data services and know offers it to SAP customers. This is also interesting since in the last opportunities that I was hearing , SAP offers to new SAP customers who haven’t implemented BW, to use the Data services instead of BW.

I understand the need of SAP  for selling new products and solution’s I really do , but in the past 2  years  it seems that the SAP BW future is starting to be uncertainty, do we need to adjust and learn new skills as we do learn the SAP Business Objects reporting tools?

Summary

From one point of view – SAP delivers to the market new products and solutions which will properly will bring more projects, on the other hand SAP new solutions seems to replace the current solution’s like BW , those solution’s brings us to a uncertainty about the future of BW .

I think that it is on SAP responsibility to tell the BW community how they want the BW community to play in those changes and whether we need to acquire new skill set or at least diminishes our worries about the future of BW.

when we take into account the decreasing market rates, when we see that the customer requirement’s is for fast & slim solutions , when you see SAP new products and solution, the SAP BW community  needs to adjust to the new SAP environment , acquire more skill set and think about the next 2-5 years today,

For comments you welcome to address me at adiroren@gmail.com