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SAP BW/4HANA – the next step towards simplicity

Last month SAP has announced the next generation of SAP Business Warehouse, BW/4HANA.

This logical step in the evolution of the Business Warehouse is completely dedicated to the HANA platform, and as such, can do without millions lines of coding to support other databases.
Also, it has unloaded the heritage of previous SAP BW versions by allowing only 4 building blocks (Composite Provider, Open ODS View, InfoObject and Datastore Object), instead of the 15 that are mostly used these days.

I think this is a good step towards simplicity and this will have huge benefits in development and maintenance. Of course, this level of simplicity can today already be achieved by BWonHANA (release 7.5), but this is without the benefit of efficient coding in the background.

Obviously, for customers considering moving to this new version, it is always a good advice to choose the moment well. Not too soon, because then there will be too many bugs that need to be fixed. But also not too late, because you will want to benefit from the improvements as soon as possible.
Nevertheless, the move towards SAP BW/4HANA will be inevitable, if you want to continue doing datawarehousing with SAP, since the future developments will focus on this platform.

So with this in mind, and since BW/4HANA will only allow 4 building blocks, it is sound advice to consider using only the allowed building blocks in new developments. And if possible, migrate the current datamodels to the new objects.

To conclude: the next step in the evolution of SAP BW is here!