By general rule, every 6 months we can expect a new version of the traditional on-premise SAP BI Platform, which comes with enhanced functionalities. In a world where everything moves to the cloud, for those customers that still want to leverage their current on-premise investments and aren't eager to see their data flying through the internet, a basic upgrade could be the ideal solution.

Call it old fashioned, but some companies are still apprehensive about giving the inevitable step into the digital era for once and for all. This was the case of our most recent customer: hosting a massive quantity of documents, "better leave as is" legacy universes, a big bunch of instances scheduled to be run in different formats to different destination types including e-mail or corporate folders, and inter-related data transfers with third-party applications via web services.

But what led a company like our customer’s to perform a migration? And why did they choose us?

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Migrations can be part of a functional need because newer versions bring new functionalities that are badly required by the business. However, they can also be necessary due to IT strategy, new operating system (OS), new version of Microsoft Office, new database (DB) connectivity needs, and that cannot be fulfilled if versions fall out of maintenance (4.1. came down to Priority 1 support at the end of 2018). In other occasions, the RAM is not enough, too many patches have been performed and the machine has reached enough cycles. In average, companies prompt to move their hardware every 5 years.

A company with a good IT department can provide hardware and follow software specifications. Installing SAP BI is not rocket science for them.  But when it comes to high availability or server tuning, an expert is required. And when it comes to the point of having to move 400GB of information from one server to another and do that intelligently so the amount of manual tuning is minimal and the time is spent cleverly, then expertise becomes a necessity. Finally, if we want to re-organize our content and configure a self-maintained, brand-new security model, we will again need some help.

Clariba is an expert SAP BI migration company. We have run migration campaigns since the very start, in 2007, to XIR2, to XI30, XI31 and then to BI40, BI41, BI42. It's been an amazing journey of 6 campaigns ran approximately every 2 years with every major version applying new tricks and optimizing the process with every new edition.

A migration to BI 4.2. is nowadays safe. The latest 4.2.SP7 is a quality release and has many features. In the final training at the customer’s site, we were presenting more than 30 WebI, 13 Universes, new features, as well as a big amount of Administration enhancements, including the CMS metadata universe. The WebI new interactive viewer assimilates the new SAP look & feel, which is interactive, mobile-ready and responsive.

Innovations are always welcome as long as they can add value to a business. Clariba specializes in integrating top-notch technology to satisfy each of our clients’ specific and relevant needs.

If you have any questions or would like to get more information in order to plan for your migration to SAP BI 4.2. please contact us at info@clariba.com.

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