BW/4HANA Migration is galloping. Should you start fresh or upgrade ?

Growing drifts in IT and digital media have redesigned today’s grounding– providing us with time saving alternatives while increasing adaptability. We’re now a generation that trusts the digital accessibility of lifestyle, travel and business resources that assist us in everyday life.

Our reach for data is now greater than ever before and hence offers more to investigate.  Simply meaning that there are huge opportunities for data analysis and discover new and hidden stories. The result provides great value as more insight is brought forth.

It’s discernible that over the years we’ve experienced a shift from print to digital, and have acquainted a contemporary approach from conventional practices in the way we attain information in terms of reports, story boards, dashboards and more.

To enjoy the astounding features now companies have started migrating their IT solutions to BI giant SAP platform with SAP BW powered by HANA, with 1 step ahead which is SAP's Next Generation Data Warehouse BW/4 HANA.

"An effective Data Management and Sizing Requirement strategy should be in place before starting of your SAP HANA migration."

Implementing SAP BW/4HANA could be crucial for any organization. Whether you have conventional SAP BW, SAP BW powered by SAP HANA, or SAP BW Edition 4 HANA, you have a several migration options you can choose from — and finding the one that best suits your requirements is essential. Should you start with a “greenfield” implementation or get the most out of your existing systems with a “brownfield” implementation? What about an acute migration to limit business disruption? 

"Technical and Functional upgradations are the essence for having a fully commodified HANA system."

Upgrade or Migration is a complicated activity and needs inordinate planning with professional guidance to follow. Organizations face issues in ensuring least downtime along with a smooth and successful upgrade / migration also making sure that the existing SAP system remains untouched. SAP needs to be updated regularly with the technological and functional changes taking place. Upgrading to SAP BW/4HANA provides you the power to transform your organization into a real-time business, you will be able to analyze new opportunities, speedy innovation and rationalize your operations for better end result.

Migration Options: What is Right for Your Business ? 

 

The judgement of how to migrate is one of the most essential aspects of any SAP implementation. Having a thought to simply abandon everything and start over on a clean, blank slate may be strong, but first consider the value of your existing BW systems.  

• Customers already on BW 7.5 Powered by HANA must have benefited from performance improvements, minimal data layers and simplifications based on the accumulation of modeling objects.Although BW 7.5 will be supported , BW4HANA may receive more upcoming innovations and developments.

• For Customers on BW 7.3 or 7.4 , SAP has recommended to upgrade to BW 7.5 and then apply the add-on for further moving to BW4HANA.

• Customers who are on older versions of BW on Any Db have an option for a green field implementation aka fresh implementation, depending on the use case or they can first choose to upgrade to BW 7.5 and eventually move to BW4HANA

The same is depicted by SAP  which suggests 3 Paths for migration to SAP BW4/HANA depending on your current landscape.

Step 1 - Upgrade to SAP BW 7.5 SP04 on HANA

This is the most lucid solution for existing customers but we would recommend you take time to do the analysis and make an informed judgement before you jump into this. If you've already got an in-flight project and you do not want to migrate to SAP BW/4HANA at this time, you need to make sure you're upgrading your current landscape to BW 7.5 SP04 or higher. SAP's Database Migration Option tool allows you to migrate from any database and any version of BW to SAP BW 7.5 SP04 in a single step.

Step 2 - Start the Object Migration

1. Clients need to figure out which of the objects are actually in use. In most of the projects, customers activate huge amounts of unwanted business content which are unused and are never deleted. We recommend you identify all these unused objects and delete them. There may be developments which never went live and there maybe certain areas of BW which are no longer used. Check with the business owners and get the approval to delete all that. According to our findings we found that these unused developments or areas accounts for 50%+ off all BW objects.
2. You need to convert all the 3.x content to 7.x content. This might be  pretty straightforward or it might be more complex. If you have a lot of 3.x content, it is recommended you consider a new system.
3. You work through each report piece by piece and then convert the remaining objects. 
   

Step 3 - Move to SAP BW/4HANA

Once you have upgraded anything and everything, report RS_B4HANA_ENABLE_CHECK will allow you to freeze in BW/4HANA mode and legacy objects cannot be created thereafter. It is then possible to move to SAP BW/4HANA which will trash all the legacy AnyDB code and activate new BW/4HANA functionality.

POC is the way to go

 

It is recommended to take a close look at the system you've got and make a quick  comparison of your SAP BW environment as it is today, what your Logical DW needs are going forward, and what is the right approach for your organization.

Most of our clients are asking us for a Proof of Concept (POC) on BW/4HANA, to see what are the after results of migration. We are backing this approach and encourage our clients to go for the POC route, have a real test and see if the new and improved functionality present in the system meet their expectations.

We are performing multiple POCs for several customers at any given moment. If you’d like more details, just contact us and we’ll discuss your specific requirements.

How would Stellium help you? 

Stellium's SAP Upgrade and Migration Services ensure a fast, smooth process; minimizing risk along with nominal downtime which maximizes business benefits. Stellium work's closely with you to manage all aspects of the SAP system migration and upgrades from start-up and planning, through functional and technical development activities to go-live and support. Stellium offers a full upgrade and migration service for your current system right from your hardware installation to the application layer.

If you're interested in a 3rd party assessment, we have developed a methodology and BW/4HANA analysis to help make the decision. Get in touch with us for more details!

SAP's Next Generation Data Warehouse BW/4 HANA

In today’s technology agnostic and competitive world, SAP has launched BW4HANA, a new generation product to address the needs of explosion of data and to manage the data effectively which can transform your business in a simple and modern fashion. Below is the evolution of SAP's data Warehouse over the years:

The newly launched SAP's data warehousing platform is designed for the HANA in-memory database. The new version is a big differentiator from the old version platform, that brings data warehousing directly into the business digital transformation.

What is SAP BW/4HANA?

SAP BW/4HANA – an integrated DW solution which is fully optimized to leverage the SAP HANA in-memory platform with new functionalities. SAP BW/4HANA effectively lowers the development and administration effort using enriched user interface resulting in enhanced business agility. 

In summary SAP provides following advantages of BW/4hana:

• An end-2-end platform for data management in order to control a digital business
• High performance using advanced in-memory data analysis and algorithms push down
• Superior application development with a completely redesigned user interface for data flow modeling
• Lowering costs for data management and storage, through automatic distribution of cold, warm and hot data
• An adequate data warehouse migration and implementation of Unified Data Management Load and full scale-out support
• Easy migration for customers with SAP Business Warehouse on SAP BW/ 4hana by supporting features

Why SAP BW/4HANA ?

We want to throw some light into new features of BW/4HANA and will try to explain you as to why we think that this is the best way forward. Here are the fundamental reasons:
  

1. Classic Database's Vs. HANA Platform

As of today, HANA has become much more efficient than classic RDBMS which offers standard SQL processing on a new in-memory architecture. There are a number of specialized engines and libraries that will allow customers to bring all types of processing capabilities near to where the data sits rather than the data to a processing layer. Predictive, geo-spatial, planning, time-series, statistical and other engines and libraries are all combined with SQL.
 

2. Legacy Objects / Backward Compatibility 

 

BW was initially architected around the properties and the cost models enforced by the classic RDBMS. Over the past years, discreet re-architecting has allowed to continuously establish BW and to safeguard the investments of BW customers. There has been a strong insistence on keeping new versions of BW as compatible with past versions as possible. Similar to sticking to "standard-ish SQL" which disrupts innovation in some areas. BW/4HANA breaks the boundaries of this strict conception of backward compatibility and compensates it with tooling for conversions that might require user interaction here and there, thus some effort. Nonetheless, this allows for removing some tradition not only inside a software product but also in existing data warehouse instances that move from BW to BW/4HANA.

3. Guidance 

 

Lastly, and that is essentially the result of 1. and 2., many of our customers and partners have asked us for guidance about which of the many alternatives BW provides they should use for their implementation. Some of those alternatives are there simply because they were introduced some time ago but would eventually become obsolete within a new product. So, SAP has decided to minimize the complexity of alternatives and launched a product, namely BW/4HANA, that offers only those building blocks that partners and customers would use it now and in coming days. The product has become simple and that will turn into simplified DW architectures.

What are the designing principles which are followed in SAP BW/4 HANA ?

The HANA optimization empowers customers to deliver on demand for simple, open, flexible and highly scalable solutions that will meet the DW needs of the business today and beyond. So, which are BW/4HANA's major selling points? What are the  "designs" or "themes" that will drive BW/4HANA? Below they are:

1. Simplicity

Depending on the situation how one counts, BW offers 10 to 12 different object types (like infocubes, multiproviders) to build a DW. In BW/4HANA, there will be only 4 building blocks which are at least as expressive and powerful as the previous 12. BW/4HANA's objects are more versatile. Data models can now be built with less buildings blocks w/o conceding on expressiveness

2. Openness

BW/4HANA - as BW - offers a managed access to data warehousing. This means that prebuilt templates are offered for constructing a data warehouse in a standard way. The latter provides big opportunities to optimize the resulting models for HANA regarding footprint, performance, data life cycle. In comparison to classic BW, it is possible to diverge from this standard path wherever needed and appropriate. BW/4HANA models and data can be defined as HANA views that can be accessed via standard SQL. 

3. Modern UI

BW/4HANA will offer enriched user interfaces for admin, data modeling, monitoring that run in HANA Studio or a browser. In the midterm, SAP GUI will become outmoded in that respect. In the same way, SAP's Digital Boardroom, Lumira, Business Objects Cloud, Design Studio and Analysis for Office will be the perfect match as analytic clients on top of BW/4HANA.

 

4. High Performance

As HANA being the driver for product strategy, High Performance in BW4/HANA is always given importance with united data load management and supporting high frequent data loads in real-time. BW/4HANA will be free of any strain and will influence any optimal access to HANA which will be interesting in the context of big data scenarios as HANA VORA offering a highly optimized "link" between the worlds of HANA (RDBMS) and Hadoop/SPARK (distributed processing on a file system).

"SAP is betting that the business wins of going all-in on HANA will be so irresistible that customers won't give a second thought about ditching other vendor solutions they might have already invested in."                                            - cited from www.cmswire.com

SAP released SAP S/4HANA and it became obvious that an update for the data strategy was needed. The questions that has remained since the release.... Do you need BW that you now have HANA? Do you switch to HANA from BW?
 
We recommend customers to take a close look at the system they've got and make a comparison of their SAP BW environment as it exists today, what Logical Data Warehouse needs are going forward, and what the right approach is for their organization.

If you're interested in a 3rd party assessment, we have developed a methodology and BW/4HANA analysis to help make the decision. Get in touch with us for more details!