Third Annual SAP Inside Track Chicago

Today 265 people attended ASUG Chicago Chapter meeting, co-located with SAP Inside Track Chicago.  Bhanu Gupta , ASUG Chicago Chapter Chair, also lead the co-location of the event.  This is the third year of SAP Inside Track Chicago.

It is a tribute to ASUG volunteers like Bhanu and Ike Hudson who spend so much time planning, coordinating, and working the ASUG Chapter meetings.  They are the unsung heroes of ASUG.

Bhanu is pictured here on the left, starting off the keynote, getting ready to introduce Vijay Vijayasankar of SAP

Vijay talked about HANA but HANA in terms of the overall applications and where you can use it.  I am sorry I couldn’t get a good picture of the slide.  He said the Business Suite is the most critical system and SAP wanted to get it right in putting Suite on HANA.

In previous times, the message was to change the business process to suit the software, and now, that technology is changing, you no longer to adjust the business process to suit the software.

Advanced BI includes predictive analysis and text analytics.  His team presented demonstrations of BW on HANA and Predictive.  Next the ASUG/Inside Track sessions sessions began.

Rohit Kamath , SAP, conducted a BW on HANA workshop.  We learned about the new modeling techniques and different options.  He explained that customers have seen an improvement in data loading, transformation, remodeling with BW on HANA.  He said remodeling is faster with BW on HANA and DSO activation is faster.

BW on HANA also offers the option of “self-service BI” with BW workspaces.  We got hands on experience with BW on HANA.  I took detailed notes here – I am not sure they are suitable for a blog on document, but when time allows, I will share. 

A lot of discussion occurred about migration of BW to BW on HANA:

Three approaches to migration:

1) In-place migration

1. BW down, upgrade to BW 730, Unicode conversion, replace RDBMS with HANA DB, implement analysis authorizations
2. Business users run
3. Minimal hardware requirement but down time

2) Option 2 – copy, upgrade + migrate

1. Two systems are in parallel
2. Need additional hardware
3. No downtime

3) New installation

Multiple BW systems on HANA are only supported in a non-productive environment

Next Ingo Hilgefort covered the Analysist BI tools on HANA and Lumira with Lumira.  We imported our BW models into HANA and then used Lumira against offline HANA. 

More pictures:

This is the crowd at Vijay’s keynote.

The lunch crowd.

Ivan Femia who also presented at SAP Inside Track.

Ingo presenting on Analysis at the BI workshop.

Attendees stayed late to do the Design Studio and Lumira exercises.

Meanwhile, across the hall, Thomas Jung was giving a hands-on HANA workshop. Photo by Thomas.

Special thanks to Bhanu, ASUG Volunteers, the SAP Inside Track speakers and all attendees for a great event.