On August 31st, 2016 we released SAP BW/4HANA. A great deal of ink and pixels has been spilled outlining its capabilities, but I’d like to look at one of the key reasons we built this new product.
As we stated in our earlier
post the Forrester research we sponsored showed a correlation between business agility and revenue growth.
In SAP BW/4HANA the option to deploy on SAP HEC and Amazon AWS (plus others to follow) in addition to on-premise, has given customers the ability to start a new BW/4HANA instance in under an hour.
BW/4HANA users also will have the advantage of enhanced modeling coupled with a dramatically simplified set of data warehousing objects and simplified governance that will enable agile data warehousing development, delivering better real-time business insights faster, and at less cost, than before. Business applications can either leverage “pre-built” data warehousing or “SQL-based” development environments that delivers faster go-to-market and lets applications work with other SQL-based solutions.
Agility is key for BW/4HANA. We have improved agility in three ways:
SIMPLICITY
• The number of data objects is reduced –eliminates data redundancies, increases consistency, and results in a smaller footprint
MODERN INTERFACE
• Administration efforts to maintain data objects and error-prone data flows are also reduced
• Customers can build their own HANA models on top of the BW/4 HANA models
• User interface will improve for administrators, as next generation HANA Studio and Browser front ends will be used instead of SAP GUI front ends
OPENNESS
• Customers see great benefit in the possibility to expose BW/4 HANA models as native HANA views
• Customers will be able to use HANA in “BW” mode and in native “SQL” mode or a combination of the two
One of our first BW/4HANA customers is Fairfax Media. Fairfax are an experienced BW customer who had business challenges that fit BW/4HANA new capabilities. With BW/4HANA the project took half the time anticipated, three months instead of six. The flexibility and simplicity of the new object set and development environment, plus the ability to develop in the Cloud were key to this success. The resulting system was 10 times faster for end users and allowed cost savings to be identified in their expenses.
Learn more about BW/4HANA at
sap.com/bw4hana
