Where is my place in HANA as an experienced BW/BO Consultant ?

[Former Member]

Another common and most raised question among the community these days. We are very much focused on clearing customers' mind, however we need to spend may be more time to the consultants who will deliver the solutions powered by HANA. That is why I am trying to seek answers to the most asked questions.

"Where is place in HANA as an experienced BW/BO Consultant ?"

This question triggers another question? Where is your expertise accumulated in the existing BI solutions? I mean are you a dw consultant / data architect (data modeler), or ETL specialist or data presentation tool expert.?

DW Consultants /  Data Architects / Data Modelers

Let's start with Data Architects / Data Modelers, you guys, you will be the one of the most wanted guys in SAP HANA. Today with existing SAP BW environment, you are deciding how data will be stored through infoproviders, which entities will be grouped by the dimensions, you decide restricted and calculated keyfigures, aggregations, partitions, etc.

BW will be still available with the extended functionalities powered by HANA, Blog: Does SAP HANA Replace BW? (Hint: Still, No.) | SAP HANA, please have look to this document created by John Appleby. Addition to this you will find more space in HANA for the real time reporting. All data which is loaded to SAP HANA, should be modeled by using HANA modeling tools:

"Modeling in SAP HANA implies building specialized views and calculations on top of In-Memory tables. These views are classified as Attribute Views (Master data), Analytical Views (Cube-like aggregations) and Calculation Views (custom calculation flows) and are consumed by reporting clients or applications. At run-time these views make implicit use of optimized SAP HANA In-Memory calculation engines and thus enable for best performance."

Please check this document SAP HANA Modeling Guide | SAP HANA you'll understand what I mean.

ETL Specialists

Consultants who are expert on data extraction from SAP systems will certainly use their expertise in HANA as well even if not BW on HANA is on the stage. Their expertise will be very much welcome if we are talking about BW on HANA, this is obvious. Now it is clear, HANA can be used as real time reporting without a datawarehouse, however data should be extracted and loaded to HANA tables. SLT, DXC, SAP DataServices, SAP NetWeaver BW extractors, Sybase Replication Server, so many different methods available to load or replicate data between different SAP applications. Please check this to make it more clear: Data Provisioning for the SAP HANA platform | SAP HANA this is prepared by Erich Schneider, thanks to him.

Bex/BO Consultants

Guys may be you are the most luckiest group, there is nothing changing for you, if you do not go deep with Lumira. All HANA analytic views are act like infoproviders. You'll use the same expertise with very much happy customers, it is really fast ! But be prepare for the competition, because SAP HANA supports the MDX query language since the beginning, its OLAP and MDX capability is built right in and included in the core system. This means any presentation tool which supports MDX,  OLE DB for OLAP (ODBO) can be used in any HANA solution. Check this : Blog: Connect your MDX speaking BI Client to SA... | SAP HANA by Christoph Morgen's Profile | SAP HANA

Finally SAP is opening a new era by HANA, but not forgetting the old pals :smile: