The new frontier of SAP BI, to turn the challenge of data into an opportunity to be seized

In the context of the constellation of products that make up the SAP offering, SAP Data Warehouse Cloud sits within the Business Technology Platform, in the Database and Data Management and Analytics section, and is proposed as a Cloud alternative to SAP BW/4 HANA or SAP HANA data warehousing. It is a next-generation Business Intelligence platform designed to harmonize data and facilitate the process of analysis and interpretation.

The Business Technology Platform offers a complete Cloud solution for the enhancement of business data:

  • With SAP Data Intelligence it is indeed possible to collect and enrich raw data.
  • SAP HANA Cloud is the powerful, highly optimized storage.
  • SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, on the other hand, acts as a centralizer of business information, enabling it to harmonize and give true meaning to data by modeling their inter-relationships.
  • Finally, SAP Analytics Cloud leverages templates for graphical and intuitive use.

In fact, SAP is working to condense the best new features to package a broader solution than previous On-Premise ones. A tool dedicated to both data analytics professionals and end users, regardless of whether they have an IT or business role.

What is SAP Data Warehouse Cloud?

In the BI landscape , Data Warehouse Cloud is the beating heart of the Business Intelligence stack: it allows you to harmonize and combine data from the most disparate sources, consolidate them, and use powerful modeling tools to obtain analytics cubes, to be consumed in visualization tools, from the most classic like Excel to the most advanced like Qlik or SAP Analytics Cloud.

In addition to the inherent advantages of being a fully Cloud solution, the separation of Semantic Layer and Data Layer, along with logical data segmentation and high virtualization of data sources, enable DWC to cover the many market needs and replace business intelligence solutions that offer more granular and unharmonized overviews.

Smart and Data Driven decisions are no longer a competitive advantage, but a necessary condition to be competitive within any industry.

As an SAP solution, Data Warehouse Cloud is highly integrated and complementary to the entire SAP Business Technology Platform, but it is important to note that it is not necessary to have a full-SAP architecture to take advantage of all its benefits.

At this point, we are ready to get into the main features of DWC, divided into the three macro-categories: elasticity and optimization, integration and collaboration, and finally end-to-end data management.

Elasticity and Optimization of SAP Data Warehouse Cloud

The elasticity and speed of the DWC business intelligence system can be seen from several aspects:

  • Scaling-Thanks to the typical features of Cloud solutions, resources can be scaled and reallocated quickly to best suit business needs. In fact, SAP Data Warehouse Cloud leverages the full potential of the HANA engine, providing flexible storage, a  Elastic scale and rapid data persistence and virtualization.
  • DW modernization – enables you to modernize your enterprise DataWarehouse by improving data models through tight integration with existing On-Premise and legacy solutions. This maximizes the ROI of IT investments by facilitating broader, more intensive and agile consumption through Self-Service Data Management for Analytics.
  • Accelerate analytics – thanks to Data Marts, data from different sources can be extracted, replicated or harmonized to create new models. Also available to the user are SAP Business Content, ready-made packages of models and analytics for major lines of business.
  • Insights and GTM – Cross Application Warehousing, suitable for classic data warehouse use cases involving business applications and data sources: modeling, extracting, cleaning, and mapping data from various sources to provide a consistent data visualization.

Integration and Collaboration in SAP Data Warehouse Cloud

SAP Data Warehouse Cloud leverages all the connectivity capabilities available in the market, thus enabling Self-Service Data Management, connecting anywhere, both inbound and outbound.

  • Open Connectivity – DWC already arranges different types of connections to different systems both partner and third-party, whether On-Premise or Cloud. It also enables the configuration of connections via ODBC/JDBC
  • Open Consumption – again via ODBC/JDBC or SQL consumption, all DWC models can be exposed to Visualization systems, both partners and third parties without any limitations. Many of these already have dedicated plug-ins for ease of use.
  • Open Collaboration – thanks to Open SQL schema technology, DWC is prepared to collaborate with external servers e.g. R-Server or datazeit for massive data processing or machine learning to send and receive data.
  • User Collaboration – DWC is designed for two types of users who will be able to easily collaborate using the same tool. In fact, thanks to the separation of Data Layer and Semantic Layer and the division into Spaces, the IT user will be able to support the Business Users of the different LoBs by providing data that is always up-to-date, real-time, coming from a single model, and most importantly, profiled thanks to the “workspaces” and data access controls per row.

The end-to-end data cycle with SAP Data Warehouse Cloud

SAP Data Warehouse Cloud is integrated with SAP Analytics Cloud: in the same environment it is indeed possible to go and develop Story or Analytics apps directly based on the created business semantic models.

As already mentioned, DWC also allows you to expose SQL views, thanks to these you can use any front-end you want.

How to explore the potential of SAP Data Warehouse Cloud right away.

SAP has made available a freely activatable Trial of Data Warehouse Cloud, through which you can explore the tool’s capabilities.

If you have long had the idea of leveraging all the data sources at your disposal, but fear that complexity may make it a time-consuming and difficult undertaking, contact RegestaLAB for information on how Data Warehouse Cloud can become the new beating heart of your Business Intelligence!