This February I got a request to support a very interesting SAP HANA assignment. One of the world’s leading reinsurance companies decided to consider SAP HANA as their new platform solution. The current architecture contains several SAP and Non-SAP source systems. SAP Netweaver Business Warehouse with SAP Business Explorer as reporting tool is used as their central strategic data warehouse. It was one of those assignments in which we had to handle a classical reporting requirement: what is the best way to build your Data Warehouse so that you are able to perform combined strategic reporting on SAP and Non-SAP data?
Next to this main question, the architecture, that has grown and became increasingly complex over time results in the following issues which could be overcome with an SAP HANA Platform solution:
• Extraction and transformation logic spread over various areas
• Data & logic redundancies
• Complex data models
• High administration effort & costs
• Missing real time reporting capabilities
So the goal was to develop and validate a new company architecture with SAP HANA as platform for the SAP Business Suite, SAP BW and non-SAP BW Data Warehouses.
My role was to be the SAP HANA platform architect. I worked closely together with several strategic architects from customer-side and we developed the attached architecture.
The architecture includes:
• SAP Business Suite powered SAP HANA including operational reporting with SAP HANA Live
• A logic hub containing of SAP Data Services as ETL tool, SAP LT Replication server as replication solution and a dedicated SAP HANA as staging
& transformation layer
• SAP Netweaver BusinessWarehouse powered by SAP HANA as strategic reporting platform holding just a minimum of transformation logic,
since the data is already coming prepared out of the logic hub.
• Operational Reporting on .Net data, which is getting replicated to SAP HANA
• SAP Business Objects as strategic and only reporting front end
With this solution we were able to address all pain points of the actual architecture which I mentioned further up. This was already a big success, but next to handling the pain points I had the task to work out further recommendations and point out pitfalls which the customer should be aware of.
Knowing that the SAP HANA journey just started at this customer the results of my assignment were very promising for the future. By acquiring and using SAP HANA as the overall company platform, the customer has a huge opportunity to prepare their IT infrastructure for the next decade. Today they are thinking about how leveraging this new platform will influence the future working method and what are some concepts that can be re-defined for the future. The work that is invested today will save time, effort and cost in the short-term.
I'm looking forward for a long-lasting, strategic and productive partnership between SAP Consulting and this leading reinsurance company.
To learn more about how SAP HANA Services can help you can eliminate barriers to fast, informed decisions, please visit us online: http://www.sap.com/services-support/svc/in-memory-computing.html
Andreas
