12    The Future of SAP BW/4HANA

SAP BW/4HANA is a new data warehouse solution offered by SAP with its own dedicated product vision and development path. In this chapter, we’ll explore the current state of the SAP BW/4HANA roadmap, its major design principals, and expected innovations.

This chapter will dive into the roadmap and related documentation released so far by SAP for the SAP BW/4HANA application. We’ll focus on describing simplifications and enhancements currently offered by SAP BW/4HANA and what to expect in the near future. The information presented in this chapter may be used to steer current development efforts and avoid potential obsolescence and rework down the road.

We’ll begin with a look at the roadmap from SAP BW to SAP BW/4HANA before moving on to the four design principles driving development for SAP BW/4HANA: openness, simplicity, modern interfaces, and high performance. We’ll use these principles to guide us through the current and expected innovations in SAP BW/4HANA.

12.1    SAP BW to SAP BW/4HANA Roadmap

A brief recap of how SAP arrived at SAP BW/4HANA may be of interest before we look forward at things to come. The path towards SAP BW/4HANA started when SAP BW was first enhanced to run on the SAP HANA database, which happened in SAP BW 7.3 SP 5. The primary goal at the time was to allow SAP BW to run on SAP HANA and therefore enjoy the increased performance offered by the in-memory, columnar database. The term powered by SAP HANA, a reference to the increased performance gained, was coined at that time.

For SAP BW versions 7.4 and 7.5, SAP dedicated time and effort to releasing new SAP HANA-flavored modeling objects and system features. SAP also focused on migrating several SAP BW processes from the application layer to the SAP HANA database to increase performance even further. This effort to push to the database, illustrated in Figure 12.1 and found in many SAP documents, was the new mantra and well under way.

Push down Logic to Database

Figure 12.1    Push down Logic to Database

With SAP BW 7.5 SP 4 came an add-on named SAP BW 7.5 edition for SAP HANA. This add-on represented an important milestone: SAP officially performed a code split for the SAP BW application. From then on, there were two independent product paths, one for SAP BW and one for SAP BW/4HANA.

The SAP BW 7.5 edition for SAP HANA add-on was the fork in the road. This add-on offers many transfer tools to allow the SAP BW application to become SAP BW/4HANA ready. In other words, the transfer tools are there to assist in converting classic objects into their corresponding SAP BW/4HANA objects. This means converting InfoCubes and DSOs into Advanced DSOs, and MultiProviders into CompositeProviders, just to name a few.

The journey to SAP BW/4HANA ends when the SAP BW system is switched to SAP BW/4HANA with the assistance of Software Update Manager. Of course, this is only applicable for existing SAP customers with years of development requiring conversion, a scenario known as a brownfield implementation. In the case of a new or greenfield implementation, no conversion is required. A fresh installation of SAP BW/4HANA would precede the development of new data flows based solely on SAP HANA modeling objects. Figure 12.2 illustrates the SAP BW and SAP BW/4HANA product paths.

SAP BW and SAP BW/4HANA Independent Roadmaps

Figure 12.2    SAP BW and SAP BW/4HANA Independent Roadmaps

With two parallel roadmaps, will SAP dedicate the same level of effort and time to both? According to SAP: “SAP BW 7.5 Powered by and Edition for SAP HANA will still be supported release options, however, SAP BW/4HANA will receive the majority of the new innovation being developed moving forward.”

Additional information about the future of SAP BW can be found in the PAM, which shows the following maintenance end dates:

We can conclude that SAP BW will remain, at least for now. However, don’t expect cool new features for it! SAP’s development efforts will be dedicated to the new product path represented by SAP BW/4HANA. Following SAP’s lead, we’ll also now focus on the SAP BW/4HANA road ahead and things to come.