Product Information
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”
I don't understand SAP anymore ... We had the same story with BPC years ago were SAP was pushing this product although BI IP was much better .
Now I see the same happening with DWC … A couple of years ago SAP was claiming the BW/4 HANA was the state of the art Data Warehouse tool . Now BW/4 HANA is only mentioned in the migration path to DWC . Although statements are maid like “BW/4 is not a dead end “ …. The only focus is to push very aggressively customers to DWC .
In the beginning SAP was bringing the message that DWC and BW/4 were two different complementary products and now they are putting huge efforts in replicating Business Content and BW/4 functionality in DWC and migration paths .
How much functionality available in BW/4 ( including Bex query / AfO ) is currently present in DWC ? 30 % …. Can we get a list ?
I am wondering what is the real motivation behind this and when SAP is going to make up is mind instead of changing there strategy every 3 years .
Maybe we should start using alternative NON SAP BI tools to safeguard our long term BI investments .
Hi Jan - thank you for commenting. I don't work for SAP; I am a customer.
I don't think a list exists because it sounds like it is in development.
As for AFO/BEx being in DWC, I don't want to comment for SAP, but in my view, I don't see how that's possible. BEx was built on 32 bit, and Microsoft stopped maintenance for .NET which AFO is built on - my opinion only.
Thanks for the feed back . I will take it up with our account manager .... And I am not the only customer who has concerns about this ...
Hello Jan
True.
BI-IP is and will the Crown of SAP Planning despite they put a "BPC License" in front of it to re-use BI-IP again. The same applies for BW/4. Running everything on a HyperScaler is as good and even better then the Cloud Offering for the next Years.
(SAP) Cloud vs. HyperScaler
The End of the Story: Probably there is no one, but Hybrid (on-premise/HyperScaler/Cloud) will serve us for the next decades
Best Regards Roland