This was an ASUG Webcast this week. Below is a recap.
Purpose:
The ASUG Influence Council for SAP Data Warehouse Cloud is an ongoing forum for customers to provide feedback to SAP.
This council meets periodically to identify, prioritize, and communicate ideas that drive enhancement and help shape the future SAP Data Warehouse Cloud road map.
What are Influence Councils?
Influence Councils are ongoing interactive forums where ASUG members can communicate ideas and concerns about product plans and SAP services directly to SAP development and product managers. The products may be in their infancy stage, such as this council or be well-established products, such as SAP BW. Input shared in influence councils (IC) impact FUTURE versions of the products.
The majority of influence councils are product related
Every council has 3 phases: Launch, Feedback and Conclusion. In each phase, two specific sets of activities occur. ASUG HQ tracks the council's progress based on which council he phase is in.
Each council has a leadership team that manages activities. This team is comprised of the Product Manager, Customer Contact and HQ representative.
The average Influence Council has 10-15 companies, with 1-2 representatives per company. Meetings take place in both a virtual and face-to-face setting depending on need.
On the right is is a graphical representation of the degree of customer related activity in the council phases. During the council Launch phase, the council leadership is very active in the planning and execution of activities. Once the council Launch Webcast has occurred and the council participant list is finalized, the council moves into the council Feedback phase. Once a council is prepared to close, the council leadership will hold a Close the Loop Webcast and send the necessary information to the SAP Influence Liaison Manager for the Close the Loop report.
Council Charter Review
This council aims to influence the future roadmap of SAP Data Warehouse Cloud by providing feedback, identifying and discussing pain points, and brainstorming ideas to improve
Provide honest feedback - Members of this council are invited to give feedback on what they like or don't like in SAP Data Warehouse Cloud
Influence the future of SAP Data Warehouse Cloud
Open discussions
Share your success stories
Focus Area
Initially we would like to cover the entire SAP Data Warehouse Cloud Product, moving forward we will likely create sub councils for specific topics of interest
Governance
Spaces, Security, Administration
Data Access
Remote Data, Local Data
Data Warehousing
Data Transformation, Process Monitoring, Scheduling,
Modeling
Business Layer Modeling
Data Layer Modeling
Security
Data Consumption
SAP Analytics Cloud Integration, 3rd Party Integration
Customer Profile
Knowledge and Experience in Data Warehousing (for example SQL Data Warehousing, SAP BW Data Warehousing, HANA Native Data Warehousing)
Participant: can be in a Business or IT role
Overview for SAP Data Warehouse Cloud
Data management needs for analytics remain unmet - why?
What is the reason for it?
Source: SAP
Business experiences data islands, silos, long running projects, high entry costs.
Data is needed faster; cannot wait days for insights. Funding high costs at the start of the project isn't always possible.
SAP's answer to this set of challenges is HANA Cloud Services.
Source: SAP
SAP HANA Cloud Services is the umbrella; the strategy is to connect all elements from database to data warehouse to analytics – into one experience.
On the left, SAP HANA Cloud is planned for later this year.
This is a business user approach, start work on the semantic level without having to understand the data models.
Source: SAP
SAP sees three typical scenarios:
1.) Data warehouse Cloud as an extension of on-premise such as BW or HANA Native Data Warehouse
2.) Greenfield scenarios for new data marts
3.) Cross application warehousing is the end goal; not there yet.
Source: SAP
SAP HANA Cloud is the platform
On top SAP implements 5 main components:
1.) Governance Services for spaces
2.) Data modelling services
3.) Business Layer for business modeling
4.) Repository services to have a strong cataloging features
5.) Security services like authorizations
On the top, SAP integrates with SAP Analytics Cloud
SAP Data Warehouse Cloud is priced based on CPU and storage
Accelerate Analytics via Data Marts
Source: SAP
"Often only expert users can make extracts from company systems and then they’re pretty much on their own. They end up using disk shares and spreadsheet programs to combine data and email items back and forth. Combining third party data starts becoming a manual process and different users may have different interpretations of the data. Spreadsheets age, and before they know it, everything is out of sync so no one has a “single truth” from the data." Source: SAP
On the left of the above, a big governed system such as BW/4HANA is governed by IT, and sometimes it is difficult for the business to work with the data, the data is offloaded, consumed by a third party tool
To solve this, use spaces in Data Warehouse Cloud
Source: SAP
Spaces give the lines of business the freedom to do fast prototyping to promote the model.
For business users, spaces are “dedicated working spaces” to model and analyze data. For IT, spaces consist of compute and storage resources that can be allocated for a specific project or team. Each space is isolated from the others and has its own storage and compute resources, metadata objects, connections and users. (source, SAP)
Business users leverage them to intuitively connect, discover and model data while IT provisions and monitors spaces.
Business users can consume the data and the resources associated with a given space independently from IT and report without delay.
Gain Insights Into All Your Data via cross-application warehousing
Source: SAP
The top of the above covers the top down modeling approach. The business does not have to deal with the technical details.
The data layer can be compared to native SQL; can connect to remote data
Source: SAP
So users can work well in a hybrid environment, DWC can bring data together, either locally (in the tenant) or third party, it can be SAP or non-SAP.
At the same time, business users can consume enterprise and external data sources with a few mouse clicks, avoiding time-consuming data duplication and spreadsheet maintenance.
Source: SAP
To get you off to a fast start, SAP Data Warehouse Cloud plans to feature pre-built business content from SAP and partners, similar to the SAP Analytics Content Network. This is to support the Intelligence Enterprise.
Extend Data Warehousing via hybrid scenario
Source: SAP
Allows for ease of reuse; want to ensure that SAP Data Warehouse Cloud understands the semantics.
Source: SAP
You can see from the above this allows you to leverage what is already there from on-premise.
Source: SAP
You can see the SAP Data Warehouse Cloud road map above.
Source: SAP
The SAP Analytics Cloud + SAP Data Warehouse Cloud is shown above.
Question and Answer
Q: Based on the slide 27, it appears that you have to have HANA Cloud to get to Data warehouse cloud? buy 2 products?
A: no, if you buy DWC, whatever is needed from HANA cloud is part of the license already
Q: DWC and HANA Cloud are parallel products?, like native HANA and BW/4
Any idea, when will it be targeted as Enterprise ready, and end to end Data warehouse ?
A: If you purchase DWC, you don’t get access to the HANA Cloud instance used as the underling database for DWC. We’re “simply reusing” the HC technology here internally. If you require a real DBaaS HC instance, you have to purchase HC, which is running independently of DWC.
Yes, DWC and HC are parallel standalone solutions. For the enterprise readiness we’re still missing i.e. the transformation capabilities which are planned for this year.
If you are interested in joining, please comment below.
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