Latest SAP HANA Platform Innovation Will Future-Proof Data Warehousing Landscapes and Unleash New Ways to Analyze Data in Real Time
SAP SE today unveiled SAP BW/4HANA, a next-generation data 
warehouse application for running a real-time digital enterprise.
In addition to traditional on-premise deployment, the new solution will soon be available on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud service so companies can conveniently modernize their data warehousing environments and accelerate their digital journey into the cloud.
With SAP BW/4HANA, customers will have a much simpler and more powerful way of achieving real-time analytics through a new foundation for logical data warehousing that provides the interactivity with historical and live data residing in a diverse IT landscape, whether within or outside the enterprise. To answer demand for open, highly scalable IT systems, SAP BW/4HANA will provide an open data warehousing environment for rapid application development, a modern user interface, advanced multi temperature data handling and support for cloud-ready offerings including AWS and SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, with other third-party cloud platforms expected to follow.
Making Businesses More Agile
To stay ahead of today’s fast-paced business requirements, users of SAP BW/4HANA will be empowered with modern data modeling techniques coupled with a unified and more streamlined data warehouse object model. In addition, simplified governance features will enable agile data warehouse development that will deliver improved business insights in real time. Business applications, including those based on SAP S/4HANA, will be able to leverage a prebuilt data warehouse or more standard, SQL-based development environment, resulting in faster, more versatile data warehouse solutions for improved business agility.
“As an early adopter of SAP BW/4HANA running on AWS, we reduced our end-to-end production time by 50 percent, allowing us to deliver a powerful new analytics platform with minimal up-front investment in just three months,” said Diego Lombardini, head of Finance Systems, Fairfax Media Pty. Ltd. “To support our constantly changing business, we now have an extremely flexible, highly scalable cloud environment that is capable of future-proofing our business.”
SAP BW/4HANA customers will benefit from:
- An end-to-end data management platform for running a live digital business through the automatic generation of views in SAP HANA that combine SQL data logic and application data taken directly from SAP S/4HANA
- Extreme performance through advanced, in-memory analytics and algorithm pushdown
- Faster application development with a fully redesigned user interface for enhanced data flow modeling
- Reduced data management and storage costs through automatic distribution of multitemperature data
- Efficient data warehouse migration and implementation with unified data load management and full scale-out support, as a de facto standard for customers
- Easy transition for customers with the SAP Business Warehouse application to SAP BW/4HANA through utility features
Increasing Versatility in the Cloud
To help ensure customers of all sizes can conveniently implement an affordable data warehouse system, SAP BW/4HANA will be available with built-in deployment for AWS and SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, with additional cloud deployment options expected to follow. In addition, SAP BW/4HANA will provide the ability to seamlessly connect to the SAP BusinessObjects Cloud solution, which will deliver a powerful environment for visualization, storytelling and data exploration. As a result, SAP BW4HANA comes with built-in connectivity to SAP Digital Boardroom. These highly flexible deployment options will add elasticity, versatility and superior price-performance options for customers.
Coinciding with the launch of SAP BW/4HANA, SAP has issued a new certification for AWS’s memory-optimized X1 instances. The new certification covers scale-out deployments up to 7 nodes totaling 14 TB of memory, making it an ideal platform for customers who want to quickly deploy enterprise workloads in SAP HANA on AWS. For more information about the new certifications and X1 instances, visit theAWS website and the AWS blog.
“With SAP BW/4HANA and AWS, customers get the ability to run SAP’s modernized data warehouse for the real-time analytics that power their business, with the elasticity, flexibility and reliability of the AWS Cloud,” said Peter DeSantis, vice president, Compute Services, AWS. “Offering more memory than any other SAP-certified cloud instance available today, AWS’s X1 instances are purpose built for customers who want to quickly try, deploy, run and optimize their critical workloads in SAP HANA at scale, without investing in on-premise infrastructure.”
Defining the Next-Generation Data Warehouse
SAP BW/4HANA intends to deliver on SAP’s vision of a next-generation data warehouse that will significantly reduce data movement and duplication by analyzing data wherever it resides, whether in data lakes with the SAP HANA Voraengine or in legacy systems within or outside the enterprise. It will also integrate live streaming and time-series sensor data collected from Internet of Things environments via smart data streaming, an event stream processing option in SAP HANA. These advanced approaches will provide unprecedented flexibility, real-time performance and the ability to overcome the challenges of data silos from highly distributed data sources. With the addition of sophisticated hot, warm or cold data temperature management and compression, enterprises can ensure all data is primed to drive rapid results at much lower storage costs.
“The digitization of business requires a modern approach to data management, data processing and analytics that can handle any data source and type in real time,” said Bernd Leukert, member of the Executive Board, Products & Innovation, SAP SE. “With SAP BW/4HANA and our collaboration with AWS, the leading cloud infrastructure provider, we are providing customers with an easy-to-consume next-generation data warehouse platform that will further accelerate their journey toward becoming a live digital business.”
For more information, visit SAP BW/4HANA and the SAP News Center. Follow SAP on Twitter at @sapnews.
