SAP Integrates Business Intelligence on New Data Warehouse

SAP AG has integrated business intelligence on its new data warehouse to improve the delivery of real-time, in-context business decisions.

During the HANA2014 held in Orlando, Fla., the German enterprise software maker released the 7.4 version of its Business Information Warehouse (SAP BW) application. The newest version is powered by the new in-memory computing platform, SAP HANA, and it is created to improve services delivered by the data warehouse.

SAP HANA (High-Performance Analytic Appliance) is an in-memory, column-oriented search engine launched in 2010 that allows real-time response as a cloud-computing service. SAP BW, on the other hand, is a reporting and analysis tool that allows users to evaluate and interpret data.

The integration of SAP HANA with SAP BW will let users send out information more efficiently and act quickly on the ever-changing needs of its end-users. It will also hasten business intelligence to front-line employees and aid companies to be competitive in real-time, while avoiding overhead data duplication. It will be able to deliver real-time end-user experience through straight-forward data modeling, provisioning, and simplified data access and governance in the in-memory data fabric.

To enable virtual integration of information from different sources and systems without moving the data from one system to another, SAP BW 7.4 will leverage SAP HANA's smart data access technology by further pushing down data-intensive processes into SAP HANA.

"We are completely changing the game for the traditional data warehouse market," said Steve Lucas, president of the Platform Solutions Group at SAP, in a press release. "By dramatically simplifying, extending and reducing the complexity inherent in traditional data warehouse architectures, SAP BW on SAP HANA will help our customers achieve real-time analytics not possible before."

In the August 2013 Forrester Research, Inc. titled Information Fabric 3.0, Forrester principal analyst Noel Yuhanna stated that "SAP has a viable data virtualization offering with SAP HANA at its core. [IT] has a strong data management portfolio comprising data quality, data integration, transformation, ETL, replication, data services, profiling and modeling. Now that SAP is integrating its data management capabilities with SAP HANA in-memory technology, it delivers the most comprehensive in-memory distributed information fabric platform in the industry."

In case you are wondering of their difference and the reason that businesses should consider shifting to SAP BW, it is for the speed. SAP BW provides faster analysis; SAP HANA is slower but is cheaper than the newer version.