SAP BW/4HANA 2.0

The Comprehensive Guide

Thorsten Lüdtke, Marina Lüdtke

• Publisher: SAP PRESS
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781493216369
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencia de la computación
• Subtopic: Ciencias computacionales general

1 SAP BW/4HANA and Its Ecosystem of Tools and Services

For when man is faced with ambiguity, with the complex shadows he only partly understands, he rejects that ambiguity and reads meanings into the shadows. And when he lacks the knowledge and technical means to find the real meanings of the shadows, he reads into them the meanings of his own heart and mind.
—Herbert A. Simon, The New Science of Management Decision, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1977.

What differentiates FAANG tech giants from traditional companies during the Coronavirus pandemic? Why have Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google continued to flourish, while businesses like JCPenney and J.Crew have filed for bankruptcy? The answer is instant digitization. While the distance economy pressures some businesses, like supermarkets, to reinvent themselves, for tech giants it opens up opportunities. These companies benefit from the on-demand trend. They plan, build, and run attractive offerings through cloud technologies and analytical tools, giving them the ability to react to changes in real time. One such analytics tool is SAP BW/4HANA, SAP’s next generation business warehouse, which combines efficient content creation with business analytics and data provisioning on the SAP HANA in-memory database.

Traditional analysis tools, such as those based on SAP NetWeaver, simply cannot meet big data requirements in terms of volume, variety, and veracity. Traditional relational databases systems can’t process the enormous volumes of data generated, and IT departments don’t have the capacity required to integrate numerous data sources promptly. Thus, a new era of information processing is about to dawn, which is often called the fourth industrial revolution.

With SAP BW/4HANA, you have a tool at your fingertips that allows you to help shape this digital change, instead of just seeing it as a threat. The technologies used are at least equal to those of the Internet giants. SAP BW/4HANA offers direct access to your operational business processes, which can be made smarter by using the fast analysis processes in the SAP HANA database. It integrates big data platforms, such as Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark, through SAP Data Intelligence. SAP machine learning libraries within its Business Technology Platform support you in setting up intelligent business processes.

In this chapter, we will introduce you to SAP BW/4HANA. In Section 1.1 and Section 1.2 we’ll discuss the global trends that are driving the development of SAP BW/4HANA. Then we’ll compare SAP BW/4HANA with previous releases of SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW) in Section 1.3, to highlight the most important innovations. In Section 1.4, we’ll explain how to navigate SAP BW/4HANA, whatever your role, and in Section 1.5, we’ll discuss deployment options, whether you plan to run SAP BW/4HANA on-premise or in the cloud. Finally, we’ll take a look at the supporting cloud technologies that make SAP BW/4HANA a robust and modern data warehousing solution in Section 1.6.

Let’s begin by reviewing the basics: what is business intelligence and how does it relate to digitization trends?

1.1 What Is Business Intelligence and How Is It Related to Digitization?

First, let’s clarify what business intelligence (BI) really is. In 2012, the second European Summer School on Business Intelligence (eBISS) took place in Brussels, Belgium. Marie-Aude Aufaure and Esteban Zimányi published the lectures, which contain some of the best definitions of the term BI we’ve come across so far.

According to Torben Bach Pedersen from Aalborg University in Aalborg, Denmark, BI is the “process of making intelligent business decisions by analyzing available data.” To him, BI also covers “data warehousing, reporting, OLAP, data mining, some data visualization, what-if analysis, and special-purpose analytical applications.” (Thus, the title of this book might have been Business Intelligence with SAP BW/4HANA.)

Nesrine Ben Mustapha and Marie-Aude Aufaure from Ecole Centrale Paris, MAS Laboratory, say that BI is defined as the “process of searching, gathering, aggregating, and analyzing information for decision making.” In that sense, BI is closer to the slicing and dicing of data that business users do. They see BI solutions as a means to “transform data into information and capture knowledge through analytical tools to enhance decision making.” However, they perceive limitations in the ability of current tools to represent business knowledge.

For the FAANG tech giants of the fourth industrial revolution, raw data is as valuable as crude oil was for the giants of the third phase. They do not limit themselves to their transaction data but have long since been collecting all business-relevant data to create a complete profile of their customers. Often the data is more valuable than the actual product—which is why so-called data products, like Facebook or Google, can be offered to customers free of charge. This creates a market power that can put traditional companies out of business.

Karl-Heinz Land, self-proclaimed digital Darwinist, technology evangelist, and founder of strategy and transformation consultancy neuland, describes this process as “digital Darwinism [that] arises when technologies and society change faster than the ability of companies to adapt to these changes.” According to ...