How does all this work together – BW, BW on HANA, Suite on HANA, HANA Live….. Part 3

[IngoH]

In Part 1 of this we introduced the different landscapes and looked at a customer without SAP as backend application and how such a customer could use SAP HANA as a data mart solution in combination with Rapid Marts.

In Part 2 we then looked at a SAP ERP customer and how such a customer could leverage SAP BusinessObjects BI with and without SAP HANA Live.

Before I will continue and discuss the options of landscape #3, which is a customer with SAP ERP on SAP HANA, I would like to clarify something based on feedback given on landscape #1 and landscape #2.

The intention of this blog series is not to outline what the benefits of SAP HANA are for a customer, and the intention of this blog series is also not to outline the benefits of the SAP BusinessObjects BI suite. You will notice during this blog series that SAP HANA can be leveraged in all of these landscapes and that the SAP BusinessObjects BI suite can be leveraged in all of these landscapes.

The goal of this blog series is to outline how products such as SAP HANA, SAP HANA Live, SAP Suite on SAP HANA, SAP BW, SAP BW on SAP HANA, and SAP BusinessObjects BI can “play together” in a customer landscape as a lot customers are getting the impression that some of these products replace each other, which is not the case.

So let’s now look at the landscape #3 – a customer that uses SAP ERP on SAP HANA, but has not created a DWH solution up to this point. The question if a data warehouse solution still makes sense in such a landscape will be answered when we will discuss Landscape #5 and landscape #6.

So before going into the details, let’s list the options that we have:

• We can use SAP HANA Live to leverage pre-delivered content
• We can use SAP HANA to create a data mart based on SAP ERP data
• We can use SAP HANA to create a data mart based on non-SAP data
• We can use a new category of applications based on SAP HANA

…and as mentioned before, in all of those scenarios we can use the SAP BusinessObjects BI suite on top of the data, so we won’t focus on that part in this blog.

Figure 1: SAP ERP on SAP HANA

So let’s look at the probably easiest scenario in this landscape. As shown in Figure 1, our customer is using SAP ERP on SAP HANA and also implemented SAP HANA Live.

SAP HANA Live provides the customer with pre-defined content in form of SAP HANA models, which can be used to deliver operational reporting directly based on the data in the SAP ERP environment without the need to replicate the data. In addition to the option to use SAP HANA Live content for operational reporting, it also allows your business users to leverage the SAP ERP data in different ways without necessary having to write ABAP code or SQL statements because they are able to leverage a set of preconfigured models for the reporting and analysis.

From an IT point of view, SAP HANA Live provides you with an environment that allows your IT department and power users to leverage standard interfaces – like SQL – to connect to the SAP ERP data and to create standard models that can be consumed by your business users.

Could you start using SAP HANA Live to replace some of the old style reports, such as Report Writer or SAP query based reporting with SAP HANA Live based content? – Absolutely.

Figure 2: Operational Data Mart

Looking at Figure 2 we can see that we can also use the SAP HANA Platform now to create operational data marts.  In our landscape where SAP ERP runs on SAP HANA, now the operational data mart could be based on a “classic” data mart approach where the data is being “extracted” (perhaps copied is a better word in this case), but we can also use a different approach and simply create a virtual data mart in this scenario and create a HANA model pointing to the SAP ERP data and the resulting model takes on the role of a virtual data mart.

Figure 3: Agile Data Mart

If we now move to the next scenario where our customer does not only have SAP ERP as a data source but also has other data sources, we can also leverage SAP HANA for create an agile data mart for scenarios where a combination of SAP ERP data and the non-SAP data is required. In this case we are using SAP HANA to combine the data from our SAP ERP environment with data from a non-SAP source.

In this scenario – different to the scenario in Figure 2 where the physical copy of data is optional – so far the data from the non-SAP source will need to be loaded into SAP HANA.

Figure 4 – SAP HANA Applications

Now last but not least, by moving to SAP ERP on SAP HANA, you are also preparing yourself for a new set of applications that are leveraging SAP HANA technology. Going into the details of these applications would go beyond the scope here, so here is a link that outlines some of these applications.

So far we covered landscape #1, landscape #2, and landscape #3. In the next blog we will look in more details on landscape #4, which we touched a little bit already this time.

I hope that people find this information useful and feel free to provide your comments, feedback, and suggestions here.