Modernise your data warehousing ahead of SAP BW’s end of maintenance

SAP will be ending mainstream maintenance for SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse (SAP BW) at the end of 2027, and it is urging customers to migrate to either SAP BW/4HANA or SAP Datasphere (formerly SAP Data Warehouse Cloud).

SAP BW is a development platform used to create and modify data warehouses, run data management tasks, generate reports and build analytics applications through either a dashboard or mobile app. As part of SAP’s pivot to favour cloud-based solutions, SAP Datasphere is being touted as the main replacement solution for data management and analytics.

SAP Datasphere provides data integration, cataloguing, semantic modelling, data warehousing and virtualising workloads across SAP and non-SAP data. It enables customers to distribute mission-critical business data — with business context and logic preserved — across their organisation’s data landscape.

Another replacement is SAP BW/4HANA, a data warehousing solution built on SAP HANA, which is a tailored-to-fit solution that is available for both cloud and on-premises systems. SAP will keep supporting the solution until 2040, while SAP Datasphere will be supported indefinitely.

SAP Datasphere provides pathways from both SAP BW and SAP BW/4HANA through a tool called SAP BW bridge, which enables connectivity and business content via proven SAP BW-based data integration (extractors) from SAP source systems. BW bridge also provides staging layers of SAP BW to manage data loads (including deltas) with partitioning, monitoring, and error handling.

Using the tool also enables customers to leverage existing SAP BW skills and protect their SAP BW investments in the public cloud.

SAP also provides a pre-check tool to identify what steps a customer needs to take to ensure their system is compatible with the conversion process. It determines which objects – data structures and components used to model, store and manage data – are compatible with SAP Datasphere and SAP BW bridge, as well as those not available in those solutions. The tool also checks which objects can be automatically converted, deleted, or need manual adjustments.

After checking for readiness and project planning, the existing SAP BW system will be cleansed by removing obsolete data and optimising data models. This stage will also involve a backup of the whole SAP BW system.

There are two conversion options, namely shell conversion and remote conversion. Shell conversion does not include the transfer and synchronisation of existing datasets but allows customers to choose to load data from original sources or the original SAP BW system. Remote conversion meanwhile enables customers to move whole data flows or transfer only selected data flows including data. Both options allow customers to ignore historical data altogether and start fresh.

Customers can either go to SAP directly via its Conversion Execution Service for SAP Datasphere, or to SAP partners that have specialised services to run the migrations.

One partner, cbs Consulting, has a dedicated Business Intelligence business unit to cater for any organisation’s SAP Datasphere conversion needs, as well as other solutions like SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Signavio.

Its end-to-end data analytics offering has industry-specific packages for verticals like utilities, manufacturing, agriculture, oil and gas and more. The data analytics-as-a-service covers business intelligence architecture, governance, data warehouse/data lake, enterprise planning and reporting and predictive analytics.

“We understand the complex business analytics world and can steer you safely through the challenges ahead,” cbs Asia Pacific Business Intelligence manager Karthick Murugesan said. “In addition to offering our technology and process expertise, we want to become a partner for our customers.”