Tammy Powlas

October 26, 2017 6 minute read

SAP Analytics Cloud: Integration Update with SAP BW Live Connectivity Webcast Recap

Source: SAP

SAP: Information about upcoming SAP Analytics Cloud webinars, workshops and previous webinar recordings can be found at: https://wiki.scn.sap.com/wiki/x/vZHHGg

The usual disclaimers apply – anything in the future is subject to change. This was a webcast from yesterday

Source: SAP

Eric Yew presented this

Source: SAP

The agenda is shown above

Solution Overview:

Source: SAP

A public cloud solution; for focused business questions – what are my key influencers of data, how extend planning

Built natively on SAP Cloud Platform

Source: SAP

Direction to be the front end for BW

Source: SAP

Regular new feature innovations every 2 weeks

Source: SAP

Live connection is preferred approach, for security reasons

Access on data in real-time and near line storage

Company data is secure behind corporate firewall and authentication

Source: SAP

Will offer direct connectivity to InfoProviders (planned)

Source: SAP

Build “purpose-built” cloud applications; self service an application building in the cloud

Will continue to deliver innovations in on premise portfolio

Source: SAP

BW/4HANA doesn’t include the BEx front-ends

Technical overview – Live connectivity

Source: SAP

Supported SAP back end prerequisites

Consider moving to BW 7.5; 7.4 has been out for 5 years

Functional integration perspective

Highlight in blue – the SAP Note 2541557 – latest SP

Source: SAP

Can access live connectivity using reverse proxy approach to achieve live connectivity without data replication

Support Apache http server

SSO supported through SAML2

CORS option highlighted in asterisk – part of wave 21 (cross origin request)

Today at Wave 20; in roughly 2 weeks Wave 21 – mid November release

If you do not have external network requirements then you can use CORS – allow secure cross domain requests – alternative option without setting up reverse proxy

Stay tuned, said Eric

Source: SAP

What’s new? Moving towards strong BEx query integration

Key areas of focus – key metadata concept – dimensions, navigation attributions, authorization variables

Support BEx structures

Existing best practices continue today

Product updates in Wave 21 – may not be in documentation today

Source: SAP

Connect to BW queries

Chart builder exposes metadata – available as of today

Source: SAP

Have BW hierarchy handling – Wave 20 supports time dependency

Source: SAP

Structures supported, usually in finance for P&L statements

Source: SAP

Support concepts of variants and personalization

“Consumptive” workflow

Source: SAP

Enhancements to prompting dialog, range exclusions, authorization variables

Source: SAP

A familiar experience to visualize data – table visualization

Source: SAP

Concept of self-service – target business users; want business users to create visualizations in Analytics Cloud

If you are on BW 7.5, support business users to create calculated measures and restricted measures

Interactivity and can bind to input controls

Source: SAP

Enhance metadata that is exposed – provide BI admins to harmonize metadata

Apply dimension groupings, renaming

Import Data

Source: SAP

Import data update – already supported

This is for data mashups

Smart discovery; can schedule refresh to keep data up to date

Source: SAP

Technical prerequisites – less of a restriction

Source: SAP

Import connectivity has landscape architecture requirements

Need Cloud Agent to connect to on premise system

Source: SAP

Stored securely in the cloud

Guidelines to be aware of

What’s New

Source:SAP

Based on customer feedback, redesigned import workflow

Should be more intuitive

Source: SAP

Prompting – part of new UX – prompt enhancements

Toggle to respect back end default – an exit, rolling forecast

Consumption of HANA Models based on BW

Source: SAP

Mixed scenario approach – HANA native consumption of BW models

Generate HANA views from BW objects without having to use HANA modeler

Leverage BI innovations using live connection to SAP HANA – geospatial, or towards end of year blending for live connectivity

Source: SAP

Generated HANA views have limitations; does not expose all semantics

See SAP Note 2317197

Integration Roadmap

Source: SAP

First focus on live connectivity

End of year, plan more on integration with BEx query concepts – linked notes, text variable support, contains pattern concept, expose short, medium, long text display; direct connection to BW InfoProviders

In 2018, transition to business side – agile, and self service for business users and BI admin

Source: SAP

Q4 started revamping import scenarios

2018: more agressive schedule to treat imported data

Questions:

Q: We already done BW4-SAC live connection but refresh not work…users must exit story and come back for effective datasource refresh….

A: story auto-refresh is a roadmap item for early next year according to https://www.sap.com/uk/documents/2017/06/e4339922-c37c-0010-82c7-eda71af511fa.html

A: Can you link live connections models with the import connections?

A: no, only reverse proxy

SAP comments:

BW queries are the objects created with BEx Query Designer in SAP BW or with the Query Designer of BW-Modeling tools (for SAP BW on HANA and SAP BW/4HANA). BW Queries are backend objects, independent of the tool to create and maintain them. Therefore BW queries also exist in SAP BW/4HANA