Regardless of software or hardware vendors, the Data Warehousing market is an area of growth, expected to increase about 10.1% in CAGR (compound annual growth rate) by 2015 according to the latest study carried out by IDC. SAP, thanks to the acquisition of Sybase, it is seen as a leader in the Data Warehouse by Gartner & Forrester. This article is focused on the solutions provided by SAP for organizations looking for enterprise-oriented data warehouses or more agile high-performance data foundations and to catch a glimpse of their future road map.

Enterprise Data Warehouse

• SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse (BW): is nowadays a very stable product, with a large installed base and in constant growth (more than 12000 customers, more than 15000 productive systems), and what more it has not been affected by the economic downturn in 2009. If we look at its future evolution, it is intended to be running on HANA in 2012 which will be used as the underlying In-Memory database Platform (BW 7.3x SP5), this means to be based on an  already built-in Business Warehouse Accelerator.

High Performance Analytic Data Foundation

• SAP HANA: is a flexible, data source agnostic, in-memory appliance that analyzes high volumes of transactional data in real-time. It includes tools for data modeling, data and lifecycle management, security and operations. It combines SAP software components which are optimized with the hardware provided by partners. The benefits are the following: make smarter business decisions supported by an increased visibility  of very large volumes of business information, react to business events more quickly through real-time analysis and reporting of operational data, a new application foundation for a new category of applications, streamline IT landscapes and finally reducetotal cost of ownership (TCO). If we look further  ahead in time, there will be a transition going from having SAP Business Objects BI 4.0 running on SAP HANA 1.0 to having the whole SAP Business Suite running on SAP HANA 2.0 in 2013.

• Sybase IQ: is a market leading, high-performance, columnar analytics server and data warehouse specifically designed for high speed data analytics, enabling high speed performance of complex queries against large datasets, with the advantage of being a low cost  maintenance when compared to row-based systems (by reducing the need for aggregates and indexes). It is a mature and proven solution with about 1900 customers and more than 3300 unique deployments. SAP will continue to support and invest on this acceleration technology, especially for non-SAP applications and data (including the possibility of placing SAP BusinessObjects BI on top).

• SAP BusinessObjects RapidMarts are preconfigured jumpstart data marts that are designed to accelerate BI. And they all come pre-packaged by subject areas and sub-areas specific to SAP modules (Finance, Manufacturing, Operations, HR, etc.) as well as for non-SAP applications (JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, Lawson, Oracle EBS, etc.). The key elements included are the following:

1. ETL Mappings: Source-to-target mappings and data transformation for relevant source tables (initial and incremental data movements).
2. Data Marts: set of target RDBMS objects and schemas based on best practices for dimensional data modeling (Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, Teradata).
3. BI Content: preconfigured universes based on best practices and samples of reports displaying  the wealth of data available.

If you need any further information on the solutions presented here, don’t hesitate to post a reply or contact Clariba.