How does all this work together – BW, BW on HANA, Suite on HANA, HANA Live….. Part1

As part of my new role focusing on SAP NetWeaver BW on SAP HANA and SAP BusinessObjects BI with SAP NetWeaver BW on SAP HANA I am lately getting very often questions like these:

• With HANA, do I still need SAP BW ?
• With Suite on HANA, do I still need a DWH ?

I think those topics have been answered already by other people and I will share some links to their views here:

http://www.saphana.com/community/blogs/blog/2013/02/21/uncovering-the-value-of-sap-bw-powered-by-hana-answering-the-second-question

http://www.saphana.com/community/blogs/blog/2013/04/03/the-hana-edw

http://www.saphana.com/community/blogs/blog/2012/08/24/new-sap-bw

http://scn.sap.com/people/thomas.zurek/blog/2010/10/15/the-bw–hana-relationship

http://scn.sap.com/people/thomas.zurek/blog/2012/06/18/why-bw-and-hana-are-such-a-good-combination

http://www.saphana.com/community/blogs/blog/2012/06/13/does-sap-hana-replace-bw-hint-no

In addition to those questions, there is also some form of confusion on how all these different elements do fit together, and that is the part I would like to try to answer here. So how can a customer leverage BW, BW on HANA, Suite on HANA, HANA Live, and BI together ?

As this is a topic that does require more than just a few sentences to describe the use cases, I would like to start with breaking up the possible scenarios in a set of customer landscapes.

As you can see in the image above, I grouped the topic into 8 different scenarios or if you prefer the term “customer landscapes”. 

What I would like to do over the next couple of days, is to go through each of these scenarios and describe how a customer can use products such as SAP BW on SAP HANA, Suite on HANA, HANA live (former HANA Analytical Foundation), or a customer DWH built with SAP technology and how these components of an overall landscape do fit together (and not compete with each other).

So in this blog post I will start with the Landscape #1.

In landscape #1 the example is a customer that is using a non-SAP based ERP environment without any existing DWH deployment. So to give a concrete example, this could be a customer running Oracle EBS as OLTP environment and the customer has not invested into a DWH solution.

So in this case, how could a customer leverage technologies like SAP HANA Live, or BW on HANA ?

Clearly the target customer for SAP HANA Live and SAP BW on SAP HANA is a customer that is using SAP ECC as OLTP solution, perhaps not to a 100% but to some degree. In our example the customer is not using any SAP ECC deployment, so those options are not suitable for landscape #1 (we will discuss a mixed scenario in landscape #4).

But could such a customer use SAP HANA ? Absolutely.

Looking back on the figure above you can see that landscape #8 will cover the scenario of such a customer creating a customer DWH with SAP technology, so we will come back to this a little bit later.

In addition to creating a full custom DWH solution (our landscape #8), the customer could also go for a solution a little bit smaller scale – Rapid Marts.

• SAP Rapid Marts are preconfigured packaged solutions that deliver best practice ETL mappings and BI content, accelerating the deployment of end-to-end departmental BI solutions for key subject areas.
• Rapid Marts focus on standard configuration of the enterprise applications and they will require customization work to fit 100% of customer requirements.
• They are meant to be easily extended and customized to suit customer-specific application implementation and departmental BI needs.

So even though the customer might not use SAP ECC and might not use SAP NetWeaver BW, the customer can use SAP HANA as part of his landscape.

In case you are interested to learn more about Rapid Marts, I would suggest this blog post from Ginger Gatling.

This covers in a short overview the landscape #1 and in the next blog we will look at landscape #2.