SAP Data Warehouse Strategy Road map #ASUG Webcast Summary

SAP’s Gordon Witzel provided this webcast earlier this month.  Special thanks to Ingo Hilgefort for arranging this for ASUG and Lindsay Wickham for setting up the webcast series.

Figure 1: Source: SAP

Note: throughout the notes DWC=SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, SAC=SAP Analytics Cloud

Figure 2: Source: SAP

Legal disclaimer applies; anything in the future is subject to change.

Priorities, deliver this year, what about BW, Data Warehouse Cloud

Figure 3: Source: SAP

Received feedback from user groups, such as DSAG, based on feedback, shaped strategy

Different questions coming

How tackle Data Warehouse Cloud, innovations

Focus is on cloud based innovation

BW/EDW customers – what is the right path?  High share of BW customers and have not migrated to BW/4HANA, most are on BW7.5 on HANA or any DB – what is the right way forward?  Move to cloud, private cloud?  Or is right strategy moved to BW/4HANA

What is the right upgrade plan?  Transparency on future positioning

Figure 4: Source: SAP

Strategic innovations – main investment – 2021/2022 for Data Warehousing

SAP Data Warehousing Portfolio way forward – how leverage cloud innovations when on BW on HANA or BW/4HANA

Plans/priorities – investment priorities

Figure 5: Source: SAP

More data coming in, available

Data is stored in silos, different applications

How to integrate all the data silos and provide data supermarket – business stakeholders can access and use this data

Different data sources – SAP and non-SAP

Data Warehousing solution – access data, regardless of where it comes from

Low code/no code modeling, self-service modeling

Figure 6: Source: SAP

SAP Data Warehouse Cloud is the latest offering for building a data warehouse in the public cloud

Three pillars  are shown above

Provide a data super market, unified service, with one semantic view of different data

For the IT and business user

IT knows how to connect, data types

Business user knows the semantics

Bring together in one environment

Connectivity – business content – SAP, non SAP, cloud, on premise

Unlock – how find data insights

Accelerate – build fast data models

Switch between federation and consistency

Figure 7: Source: SAP

How this looks from architecture, and overall capabilities

Data from different sources, how to connect to different sources, introduced terms of spaces – independent data marts

On top, 2 layers – Data Layer is for IT to connect to different sources, do the joins

Business interface – building the semantics, KPIs

On the side is the business catalog – providing 1 view to different semantic layers; browse through different semantics, google like search, find KPI for revenue, how coming from through data lineage

See how bring together

Start visualizing data

Figure 8: Source: SAP

Road map is at roadmaps.sap.com – Link to road map – logon is required: https://roadmaps.sap.com/board?PRODUCT=73555000100800002141&range=CURRENT-LAST#Q3%202021

Selected highlights are above

Open connectors – allow to use from SAP Cloud Platform integration suite – 170 different source systems like SharePoint, OneDrive and more

Input Parameters – coming

Geo Enrichment – latitude/longitude in analytical dataset, and use that dataset in bubble heat or flow layer

Text association – provide multi language support for master data for DWC/SAC

New data centers – plan to introduce data centers in South Korea, Canada (AWS) and new Azure based data center in US West Coast

Figure 9: Source: SAP

Recent planned innovations

Data Marketplace

Catalog in DWC

Business Content Packages – continuous growing industry and line of business packages to jump start building applications

Investing reuse of investments – BW customers, ABAP based customers – how enable, reuse existing data ingestion and staging from on premise and transfer to public cloud – “converge” support – ETL logic from on premise BW  – planned for 2021

SAP Data Warehouse Cloud is the data foundation for SAP planning solution – will try to achieve this year

Data Marketplace – can integrate external data

Add outside in perspective to spaces

Figure 10: Source: SAP

Single view

Central catalog service for DWC/SAC, access data, cross lineage, independent definition of business terms

Unified catalog across the products

Figure 11: Source: SAP

What is the right strategy for BW?

On the left; depends on your overall company strategy

Private/on premise – BW7.5 or BW/4HANA on premise

BW/4HANA is strategic on premise offering

Can shift BW to the private cloud

Hybrid use case – still have investments in BW, and combine with DWC – new use cases include integrating cloud applications, one catalog, use data marketplace

Still investing on BW/4HANA offering itself

On the right side for the public cloud, DWC; plan convert/migrate existing BW investments into public cloud – currently developing, coming soon

“BW/4HANA is not a dead end”

Provide options to reuse existing BW investments to public cloud

Figure 12: Source: SAP

DWC investment areas in 2021

Support S/4HANA content – reuse the CDS semantics, enhance semantics, build additional logic

• Get business logic from S/4HANA system
• Reuse and enhance logic

Input parameters, currency conversion from S/4HANA

Shut down and hibernate a space – data mart no longer needed and can reactivate

More data center services

Figure 13: Source: SAP

BW/4HANA road map

Speed of innovation is different than DWC; typical of on premise and cloud solutions

One feature pack per year

DWC – waves every 2 weeks

Highlights for BW/4HANA – SAP BW/4HANA release for 2021 – performance, partition less than a calendar year

BW/4HANA model transfer – reuse BW queries in Data Warehouse Cloud

In 2022, native storage extension for scale outs

Support SAP HANA Data Lake as cold storage for those not running IQ as cold store

Integration of BW models to Data Warehouse cloud is the main area of investment in 2021/2022

Provide clear path from BW on premise to Data Warehouse Cloud

Figure 14: Source: SAP

Key takeaways – high pace of innovation in DWC

Seamless migration path from BW to cloud

Figure 15: Source: SAP

Different slide from before

Left is on premise

Middle is hybrid

Right – public cloud

Q&A

Q: ABAP SQL on BW generated views – what does it mean?

A: Not available yet; will be for reuse

Q: How many SAP DWC customers in market?

A: not say exact, couple of hundred

Q: Can we use AMDP in DWC?

A: In DWC, no option to use ABAP managed data procedures – no ABAP framework available

With integration option provided soon, likely ABAP runtime available, reuse AMDP

Q: If I use BPC on BW can I move to cloud

A: Currently BPC as an add on will not be an integration option with DWC

Focus in 2021 planning foundation

Q: How manage performance in DWC (hot, warm, cold storage)

A: Idea is system is doing it automatically

Should be no manual interaction to manage hot, warm, cold

Working on that development

Q: Is there any plan to combine DWC/SAC?

A: Separate products – idea is that you can use DWC from visualization application

Q: DWC cannot be deployed on Google Cloud

A: plans for this in 2022 as far as speaker now

Link to road map – logon is required: https://roadmaps.sap.com/board?PRODUCT=73555000100800002141&range=CURRENT-LAST#Q3%202021

Q: Can we go from BW7.5 on HANA to go to DWC?

A: Yes, this is the idea of integration piece; plan to provide tools, migration path, to enable BW7.5 to move to DWC

Note: ASUG members can register for an upcoming think tank with Gordon in October titled “Discuss Strategy for SAP BW/4HANA, SAP SQL Data Warehousing, and SAP Data Warehouse Cloud”