Does SAP HANA Replace BW? (Hint: Still, No.)

This time , I participated in the blog discussion, indeed a topic that can only grow over time.

http://www.saphana.com/community/blogs/blog/2014/04/17/does-sap-hana-replace-bw-hint-still-no#comment-5510

I am particularly interested in the below statement:

• If you just have ERP as an operational standalone system then put ERP on HANA and use HANA Live

• If you just need a data-mart alongside ERP then use HANA Enterprise and SLT for real-time replication

• If you don't have BW and need an EDW then use BW on HANA, preferably with ERP on HANA and HANA Live

A pragmatic BI Vision

BI won’t work without single source of truth, BI governance, evolving innovation, streamlining with backend technology and self-servicing frontend. All these components are inter-related and play a vital role in the BI roadmap .

BW on HANA , how it speeds up things?

The BW OLAP engine has now become the OLAP Compiler for HANA, also known as the Analytic Manager, pushing down further OLAP operations down to HANA provides offering unrivaled query performance. Additional business insights can be achieved by overcoming existing ABAP based limits. A summary of the OLAP features pushed down into the HANA database is summarized below:

OLAP Features pushed down to HANA in BW 7.3x

• Restricted key figures
• Exception Aggregation CNT for quantity key figures without unit conversion
• Exception Aggregation of currency key figures with optional currency conversion

OLAP Features pushed down to HANA in BW 7.4 SP5

• Avoid intermediate result set materialization (e.g. Exception Aggregation)

OLAP Features pushed down to HANA in BW 7.4 SP6 and beyond

• Stock coverage Key Figure
• Hierarchy Handling
• Formula exception aggregation
• Processing of further query scenarios in HANA (Joins, Union, etc.)
• Handling of inventory Key Figures

* Pluck from http://www.agilityworks.co.uk/our-blog/sap-bw-7-4-sp5-on-hana-better-smarter-faster/

Everything suddenly seems NEW NEW NEW & BIG BIG BIG

I'd been doing some research over the weekend, well what a way to enjoy life but it is interesting yet troubling for me to grasp so many new things happening in SAP technology. And by this I am not just referring to the new kid in town - HANA Studio. 

SAP HANA Cloud Portal

http://www.sweetlets.com/w/2013/06/hana-cloud-portal-from-the-perspective-of-a-test-partner/

Unified development environment for BW via Eclipse

http://www.agilityworks.co.uk/our-blog/sap-bw-7-4-sp5-on-hana-better-smarter-faster/

                                                                  

SAP BW 7.4 Generates HANA Views accessible via SAP Lumira

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=33PR1w2_pzs

SAP RIVER

I registered for a trial version but the river is always flooded!! But in short , this is the new language to develop web application base on SAP HANA. 

https://1vr.asia.sap-river.com/river/webStudioShell/webStudioShell.html

It is mind boggling technology for a lot of  BW/BO Consultants out there. I bet most of them are hoping to play on the ground of  BW 7.4 on HANA now!

LSA and LSA++

LSA seems to be a hot BW jargon three years ago where most companies strive to standardize the data modelling design. Of course, I personally believe not all dataflow require LSA , example straight forward data from excel file. But nevertheless, the beauty of LSA is we minimize the risk of losing historical data (PSA then was supposed to have housekeeping and not serve as historical data storage as in LSA++) and changes in transformation layer can be reloaded from propagation layer safely without the need to re-initialize. Plus if we manipulate data in start routine from propagation DSO to transformation DSO , the key figures are not cumulative when looping the source package, unlike start routine between DSO and Infocube. And finally the aggregated data flows up to InfoCube for reporting. There is also Corporate Memory Layer available in DSO W/O to retain historical data.

Ok, with in-memory technology or famously known as HANA, snow flake schema got flatten out. No more SIDs meaning no longer reporting needs  InfoCube, in-memory-optimized DataStore objects, which can be used for reporting. So we now have LSA++. From 4 layers now it's 3 layers. We can also see they brought back 'InfoSource' in the picture, I'd always think InfoSource is useful when it come to 2 steps transformations.The data is acquired in the open operational data store layer. The PSA serves as the historical data foundation. No transformations or aggregations are defined in this layer.The data is then harmonized and transformed to the core EDW layer. The DataSource and the DSOs in the core EDW layer are connected by an InfoSource. A virtual data mart layer is used for reporting. InfoProviders that reside in this layer do not contain any data. Instead, they describe which data is accessed, and how it is displayed semantically to the end user. MultiProviders usually access the data from DataStore objects.

HANA Adoption Strategy

For most organizations,eventually it will come to a point where there will be hot debate on deciding to get HANA in or not. HANA is sometimes mistakenly took in as a new tool to improve reporting and planning performance and the investment evolves on funding the hardware, upgrade and licences. Well, it is not uncommon approach as scoping those mentioned areas already took up millions of dollars. And to take off HANA as new technology together with a strategic adoption program, it will cost triple fold of the initial set up cost.

HANA is actually a roadmap and a BI adoption program beside treating it as another 'Accelerator'. The implementation roadmap needs to be planned according to:
• Assessment of current BW environment to decide the migration strategy
• Alignment with SAP BO Upgrade and new innovations such as Lumira,Mobi & Explorer
• Alignment with Master Data initiatives
• SAP BI Governance Adoption
• Integration and adoption across other integrated systems, departments, projects
• Delivering business values and innovations in line with company long term goals and BI visions

Companies out there should avoid making mistakes to get only the hardware and tool in place without streamlining it as part of the long term BI roadmap that consist of stakeholder positioning in BI, delivering business values, adoption, governance, scalability, program sustainability in economic downturn, and global support. Having to say that, BI at the end of the day  is an expensive practice/tool/process that can only deliver back the ROI if it is strategically executed and planned.

Potential Impacts of HANA Migration to the SAP BO

This is a good article for us to refer on the potential impact on BO when BW moves to HANA. Please take note that there is effort required on changing the data connection path on the universe we have currently and this may require to be done during the cutover window.

What is HANA?

I often hear people asking around 'What is SAP HANA'?

My definition
SAP HANA is a database itself, and it only runs on SUSE Linux. It is RAM working on Write/Read Controller modules on Data Volume and Log Volume store in disk. When you write data to SAP HANA, it is written to the logs first then moved into RAM. The ‘disk’ here meaning file system on a Fusion-IO SLC or MLC nand flash card or RAID 10 controller with an array with SSD disks (depending on the hardware vendor). This sounds like a lot of Basis stuffs and yes if we see it from the sole angle of migrating the database from rdbms to in-memory, this is it , something new and exciting for Basis guys.

So what is in store for BW guys? Ok, here is where BW consultants need to pay attention to. You see SAP sees HANA as a game changer, in a way, there are so many potentials lies within the area of Business Analytic. So they introduce to you SAP HANA Studio. This is where the future RSA1 and DB02 take place. And the peak of the action happens when ECC itself sits on top of HANA and  HANA Business Contents are made accessible directly from HANA Studio. If you are a BO guy, you already know data provisioning is available directly from HANA real time data straight into the dashboard or reports.

How about ABAPERs? HANA Studio itself is built from Eclipse. So if you are an application developer, having sound knowledge on Java is crucial as I can only imagine instead of developing workflow in webdynpro , we can do it in Java. Of course, on top of all this, we can't run away from the integration with ECC in which BADI and BAPI skillsets are always hot in that area. So ABAPERs, you are always in demand.

To get to the ultimate HANA landscape, just like any technology lifespan, there is transition and obsolete.
Well, let's not dwell into the word 'obsolete' in this case (Although I do believe it contributes to a lot of worry factors among BW consultants) .Focusing on the word 'transition', that is when we start to google up on words like HANA optimized Infocube, HANA optimized DSO, Semantic Partition, 'Sidecar' approach, SLT, DXC and the favourite for BPC-ABAP developers - Code Pushdown.

Quote from Vishal Sikka:
There is another possible reality. HANA offers an opportunity to rethink business processes. The business driving elements such as decentralisation and the explosion of interrest in mobile are in play. Cloud vendors are showing us important elements of the technology with which to get the job done. Despite what detractors might say, HANA really does have disruptive potential.

Here is a list of Google search results from various sources:
WIKI
SAP HANA is an in-memory, column-oriented, relational database management system developed and marketed by SAP AG.

Note:
Column-oriented organizations are more efficient when an aggregate needs to be computed over many rows.
Column-oriented organizations are more efficient when new values of a column are supplied for all rows at once.
Row-oriented organizations are more efficient when many columns of a single row are required at the same time.
Row-oriented organizations are more efficient when writing a new row if all of the row data is supplied at the same time.


SAPHANA.COM
SAP HANA is an in-memory data platform that is deployable as an on-premise appliance, or in the cloud.  It is a revolutionary platform that’s best suited for performing real-time analytics, and developing and deploying real-time applications. At the core of this real-time data platform is the SAP HANA database which is fundamentally different than any other database engine in the market today.

Wikibon
SAP HANA Enterprise 1.0 is an in-memory computing appliance that combines SAP database software with pre-tuned server, storage, and networking hardware from one of several SAP hardware partners. It is designed to support real-time analytic and transactional processing.

Techopedia
SAP HANA is an application that uses in-memory database technology that allows the processing of massive amounts of real-time data in a short time. The in-memory computing engine allows HANA to process data stored in RAM as opposed to reading it from a disk. This allows the application to provide instantaneous results from customer transactions and data analyses.HANA stands for high-performance analytic appliance.

Searchsap
SAP HANA is a data warehouse appliance for processing high volumes of operational and transactional data in real-time. HANA uses in-memory analytics, an approach that queries data stored in random access memory (RAM) instead of on hard disk or flash storage.

Cost Allocation Project

It'd been a while since I last blog. I was moving from HANA to BPC on and off in the fluid environment in my current organization. But getting into BPC was something very different from what I used to do as a SAP BI consultant. Actually there is a lot of Abap, CO config and BPC frontend and very little of BW development. Anyhow, the solution we rolled out is really neat and creative. An Abap program was developed to simulate Cost Allocation process from ECC and the data is updated in real time into a write-optimized DSO, in this case it acts as a table. These data is loaded into an Infocube and through a Data Manager package that call a BADI , the results is extracted into a BPC model. The model is used to enable planning in BPC for secondary cost.This was possible because ECC BAPI was triggered from BPC via a RFC connection and data was retrieved from AL11 back into BPC. The best thing about this program is we are able to create a snapshot view of each run for the cycle (sometimes the users may run more than one time for the same cycle after making changes in the cycle configuration or percentages of allocation), cycles are categorized for each Region accordingly (hence making it possible to have an authorization check for  user  over a particular cycle), data updated directly in BPC and preliminary check was done on dependent cycle (example a WBS Element that acts as a Receiver has to be run before a cycle that has that same WBS Element as a Sender). The checks on dependent cycle eliminates a lot of manual work in which it used to be a dreadful practice to run Cost Allocation by different focal person through a series of 'take turn' sequencing to cater for cost objects involve in inter company elimination. I got really used with tcode such as KSUB, KSU7, KSU8, KSU9,  CJI4, KAH3, KJH3, KP06 etc.The Abaper I worked with is an amazing coder who managed to have the work evolved 'beautifully' around this important function module K_ALLOCATIONS_RUN.

If the whole Cost Allocation process can be simulated from BPC , the whole planning process is possible to be shifted over from ECC to BPC. The approach is through  simulation because the BAPIs are only available in ECC contents and not in Netweaver. It can be interesting topic for licencing as if planning can be triggered from BPC, planning focals  may not be needing ECC access. Well, for existing BPC planning solutions, instead of performing extraction and retraction in and out from ECC, you can consider this approach.

*For Extraction mode, BADI that normally substitute the conversion file in Data Manager Packages is used and is triggered from transformation file (Script Logic) in Data Manager Package. As for Retraction ECC, a BW process chain can be used by declaring it in the transformation file and then run the Data Manager Package.

HANA...

My first question when I into the diagram below is will HANA be able to replace the SAP BI (backend)? In my opinion, after going though some articles by Thomas Zurek , I do have the impression that the future data modelling and transformation can take place in the database-level modelling tool .In one of  the talk on HANA by Daniel Rutschmann, he answered the question by saying that BW will not be replaced as there is a need of having a datawarehouse system for harmonization and consolidation purposes, eg. to consolidate data from more than one ERP system in a company (But bear in mind, any multinational company out there will surely put aside a big budget to cut down cost of operation and to standardize the process through convergence of all the ERP systems into one single instance). John Appleby says 'No', with one of the reason being the business content (But it won't be a surprise that SAP is starting to look at building HANA around the business suites).

This is an interesting forum that discuss some of the confusion and in this clip, you can see how well SAP BO integrate directly with SAP HANA. This is also an interesting technical step by step document that demonstrate how a variable is applied in HANA modelling.

SAP HANA Overview and Roadmap 

 

Big Changes in SAP BI with the new acquisitions

We have all heard of SAP acquisition of BO,Outlooksoft and HANA. For BO,the impact hits directly on the SAP Bex frontend tools as it will replace Bex query and WAD as the frontend reporting tool. But there is still a lot to work on the integration part between BI7 backend and BO in which we are still seeing Bex query as a much needed component to integrate the customer exit and authorization portion with the BI7 backend engine. Universe is still build on Bex query, and it is required for Webi and Xcelsius via QAAWS to read the dataset.But in BO4, the universe layer is eliminated, as in the Bex query integrate directly with Webi and Xcelsius. Before BO acquisition, SAP never has a true dashboard tool and this position Xcelsius as the strategic dashboard tool for SAP.

As for acquisition of Outlooksoft, SAP has already build a strong integration of the new BPC tool with the netweaver platform. BPC will be a poweful budgeting and consolidation tool that leverage on excel and netweaver platform. But a lot of customers on BI-IP and SEM-BCS are quite reluctant to transition their existing budgeting and consolidation tool as that would merely means a whole new setup and deployment in the wide organization. There is not any direct linkage between BI-IP, SEM-BCS and BPC. They are completely different tools altogether, meaning there isn't any real transition, it means replacement.

It took quite a while for HANA to evolve when SAP bought over Transactions In Memory. But ever since BO acquisition and cost of hardware storage become more affordable,the future of SAP BI is starting to piece all the new products acquisition into picture as we are now seeing HANA to tap into huge volumes of detailed information directly to access real time data. HANA is expected to include BICS,SQL and MDX interfaces, meaning that it can be easily dropped into BO environments to dramatically improve performance. Some BO analyses, whether in the BO web client interface or in Advanced Analysis can achieve optimized reporting capability through HANA.

Many BW consultants are in pressure to move into BOBJ and HANA platform so to catch up with the desired skillsets in the future job demand. Some of the info in the links below provide some clarity on the whole transition from SAP Bex to BO as well as the positioning of HANA and the BW backend.

Business Objects vs. BEX
Is upgrading to SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.0 right for you?
SAP BI roadmap one year later: How's Business Objects working out for SAP BI customers?
Customers express hopes for, concerns about SAP BusinessObjects 4.0
What to do with BEx tools in a BOBJ world?
SAP: Don't rush from SAP BEx tools to SAP BusinessObjects
HANA and BW 7.30
SAP HANA Overview & Roadmap
Will HANA eliminate the need for BW? 
Why SAP HANA should start replacing SAP BW?

When it comes to in memory data modelling, this is the part I am a bit confuse. How is SAP going to integrate and maximize the features of SAP BODS and Hana Studio.

We have also heard of  Rapid Application Development. The objective of such tool is to enable customer to deliver something fast within the company's budget. The tool is bundled into most of the stuffs the user can use out of the box with some configuration on the master data and authorization being the biggest chunk of work there is. A good example is the SRM BI module called Spend Performance Management. The dashboards and reports are made available in the package and data is retrive directly from the ERP via Data Integrator. Now, that put SAP BW closer to the space of legacy tools.

SAP BI-BO-BPC-Xcelsius Integration

Recently I came across a reporting requirement to develop an Xcelsius dashboard that contain data  from BPC reporting.The first thing that came across my mind is the integration point and the single version of truth in terms of the final results and formulas applied in BPC.We can connect Xcelsius to the BPC Applications via the universe using QAAWS or we can opt for the EPM connector that leverage on the Extended Analytics.For the later approach, be careful that the Extended Analytics and the EPM connector wil only work in Xcelsius if the Service Pack level for the ODBO driver is the same as the Extended Analytics. Else you may encounter issue using 'getreportdefinition' command in the Extended Analytics or connecting to the BPC server via EPM connector.

Another thing to consider is the SSO, if your BPC has domain login and BO server has SAP logon, there is no way you can skip the BPC domain logon prompt when you refresh the data from Extended Analytics.Using the Extended Analytics and EPM approach,we can use the Custom Member feature to apply the MDX formula to derive any calculated field.

Another thing that came across my mind is the single client tool that the organization has to strategically deploy across for all reporting users. For example if consolidation and budgeting is build on the BPC platform, it is just logical that the reporting on group console and budgeting reports are done from Extended Analytics which enable user to read the BPC data structure rather than start building Webi or Bex reports out of BPC applications due to the differences in BW and BPC structure. Furthermore  BPC v10 client can read both BPC and BW structures.

In regards of Xcelsius, finance dashboard can be build from the EPM connector interface and other reports such as PTP or OTC reporting via the universe from QAAS. In BO4, universe layer is not required anymore to read from Bex query. Instead there is Advanced Analysis (embedded in Excel engine) that has direct connectivity to SAP BW backend system and Bex query.Xcelsius can consume data displayed in Advanced Analysis via BICS (BI Consumer Services). Just take note that Advaced Analysis (as well as Explorer) does not come in BO Starter Package licence.