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IngoH
Advisor
Advisor

In Part 1 of this blog series I introduced the different set of landscapes with the goal to clarify, how a customer could leverage BW, BW on HANA, Suite on HANA, HANA Live … and all of that in combination with SAP BusinessObjects BI.

We also covered the landscape #1 – a customer that runs a non-SAP OLTP solution without any DWH solution in the first part already.

So let’s go to landscape #2, which is a customer that uses SAP ERP on a standard RDBMS (not on SAP HANA) and without a DWH solution.

When we come to landscape type #5 to landscape #8 we will talk about how such a customer could leverage BW, BW on HANA or a another DWH solution and which technology SAP can bring to the table in such scenarios.

So this leaves us with two parts: SAP BusinessObjects BI and SAP HANA Live for a customer running SAP ERP.

So how can a customer with SAP ERP only leverage the SAP BusinessObjects BI stack and perhaps even combine it with SAP HANA Live?

SAP ECC with SAP BusinessObjects BI (without SAP HANA Live)

SAP BusinessObjects BI does have connectivity options for an SAP ERP environment and customers can leverage the BI suite directly with the data from their OLTP environment. The figure below shows the different options.

As shown in the figure above there are two main options to connect to the SAP ERP system:

  • Customers can leverage the Universe layer in BI4 and connect to several sources in the SAP ERP system : classic InfoSets, ABAP Functions, ABAP queries
  • Customer can leverage the Transient Provider in the local BI client of your SAP ERP system and use a BEx query in this local BI client pointing to a classic InfoSet (requires ECC6 Ehp05 or higher).

SAP ECC with SAP BusinessObjects BI with SAP HANA Live

A customer has two main options to leverage SAP HANA Live :

  • a side car approach where SAP ERP stays on the existing RDBMS system and the data is being replicated into SAP HANA
  • a DB migration to SAP ERP on SAP HANA

So where is the major difference between the side car approach and the integrated approach ?

  • With the integrated approach you are reducing the overall TCO and you are consolidating your overall SAP landscape onto the SAP HANA platform
  • With the integrated approach you are not only accelerating the analytics part of your overall SAP ERP landscape, but instead all of your transactional workflows will benefit from SAP HANA

on the other hand, the side car approach allows customers to get SAP HANA Live up and running next to their existing SAP ERP system, which could be seen as a quicker deployment but you could also see it as an interim step on the way to SAP ERP on SAP HANA as clearly the direction should be to move to SAP ERP on SAP HANA to not only accelerate the reporting part, but instead to really leverage SAP HANA for the complete SAP BusinessSuite.

So what’s the value of using SAP HANA Live beyond the “speed of in-memory technology”?

  • SAP HANA Live delivers pre-delivered SAP HANA models that can be used for reporting and analytics
  • SAP HANA Live also delivers content for SAP BusinessObjects BI suite based on the models in SAP HANA Live
  • The combination of SAP HANA and SAP HANA Live also enables our customers to leverage more advanced topics, such as Predictive Analysis

In addition to the benefits already mentioned, here some other thoughts:

  • SAP HANA Live provides you with the ability to use standard tools like SAP HANA Studio and SQL to access your SAP ERP data
  • SAP HANA Live delivers pre-configured models, so you can hide the complexity of all those SAP ERP tables from your business users
  • SAP ERP on SAP HANA not only allows you to create analytics on large data volumes in real time, it also accelerates your transactional workflows
  • With SAP HANA Live or SAP ERP on SAP HANA there is no need to wait for your data load to finish to get your analytics updated....

..... but SAP ERP on SAP HANA does not replace the need for a data-warehouse.... =:) which we will discuss in landscape 5 to 8.

(and there are still 5 days left until Christmas)

Some additional resources on SAP HANA Live:

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