SAP Data Warehouse Cloud — Foundation for Today’s Analytics

Data warehouses have been staples of enterprise analytics and reporting for decades. Many SAP customers have been using SAP’s on-premise data warehouse solution, SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW). With mainstream maintenance set to end for SAP BW 7.5 in 2027, many SAP BW customers have been moving to SAP BW/4HANA.

Yet, these popular data warehouses aren’t designed to handle today’s burgeoning data of increasingly different types that reside in diverse data stores across the world in company data centers, and private and public cloud.

SAP Data Warehouse Cloud — Foundation for Today’s Analytics

Data warehouses have been staples of enterprise analytics and reporting for decades. Many SAP customers have been using SAP’s on-premise data warehouse solution, SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW). With mainstream maintenance set to end for SAP BW 7.5 in 2027, many SAP BW customers have been moving to SAP BW/4HANA.

Yet, these popular data warehouses aren’t designed to handle today’s burgeoning data of increasingly different types that reside in diverse data stores across the world in company data centers, and private and public cloud.

Cloud Data Warehousing has brought a revolution to the space. With the cloud, data warehouses are not constrained by physical data space and can scale up and down to meet requirements. They can also meet the demand for rapid access to analytics by business users in various formats.

While there are many cloud data warehouses, SAP rolled out a unique bundled solution that combines many aspects of the data infrastructure in a well-integrated manner. Watch this video presentation from SAP to learn about the evolution of SAP’s data warehousing — The future of data warehousing.

SAP Data Warehouse Cloud combines data and analytics solutions in the cloud. It is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) that includes database, data warehouse, data integration, and analytics, all built on the SAP HANA Cloud database.

There are four main challenges that organizations have faced when it comes to data management, warehouse, and analytics solutions: scalability, complexity, ease of use, and business semantics — as outlined in this expert article.

SAP solves these challenges with these key features of the SAP Data Warehouse Cloud:

• Connect data across multi-cloud and on-premise repositories in real time to SAP or third-party analytics solutions such as Qlik,
• Empower users with a no-code environment to connect, model and visualize data.
• Analyze all types of structured, unstructured, and geospatial data with in-memory speed.
• Accelerate implementation with pre-integrated database, data warehouse, data intelligence, data lake, and analytics capabilities.
• Reuse existing BW models, transformations, and customizations with the BW bridge option.

What can current SAP BW or SAP BW/4HANA customers do? They can choose to move their data to SAP Data Warehouse Cloud and run it on various cloud solutions such as NetApp, AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. Alternatively, they can just have SAP Data Warehouse Cloud consume the datasets directly from SAP BW/4HANA. They can also deploy a hybrid model and leave some data on premise in SAP BW/4HANA and put some data in the cloud in SAP Data Warehouse Cloud.

Data architects must carefully assess the pros and cons — business needs, costs, technical requirements, risk — to identify the future of their data warehousing. This article can get you started on building an agile data platform with SAP Data Warehouse Cloud.