King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) is a private research university located in Thuwal, Saudi Arabia.

KAUST focuses on research that applies science and technology to problems of human needs, social advancement, and economic development.

OBJECTIVES

In alignment with its company values which involves embracing new technologies and as part of its corporate strategy, KAUST decided it was time to move its existing SAP analytics environment to the cloud. As part of its modernization journey KAUST decided to work with Clariba to migrate its SAP BW and SAP BI BusinessObjects systems to a new Microsoft Azure cloud environment with the objective of achieving the following benefits:

1. Improved performance of the existing systems

2. Better interoperability with cloud solutions

3. Increased cost-effectiveness

4. Higher availability, scalability, and flexibility

5. Updated security standards and privacy

APPROACH

The SAP analytics environment, which was based on an Oracle Database and located within an on-premise data center from IBM, was to be moved to a brand new Azure cloud data center. The solutions would be upgraded to the latest versions available in order to leverage state-of-the-art functionalities and capabilities.

The team members involved in this project were located in three different countries yet shared the same values of achievement, passion, integrity, openness, working independently and remotely while coordinating via periodic meetings. The main areas of focus were: 

1. Infrastructure

2. SAP BW / SAP HANA

3. SAP BI BusinessObjects

4. Interoperability with SAP Analytics Cloud

TECHNOLOGY

With steering from KAUST management, the Clariba team acted as a coordinator, implementer, and knowledge matter expert for the four focus areas. With the infrastructure prepared on Azure, the following key activities were successfully performed:

• Installation of new SAP HANA Servers

• Installation of 2 SAP Business Warehouse (BW) 7.5 on SAP HANA environments (Production and Development)

• Installation of 2 SAP BI BusinessObjects 4.2 environments (Production and Development)

• Content migration and upgrade

• Functional migration and ongoing support of the SAP BW upgrade

• Content review, testing, support, and configuration improvements on the SAP BI reporting side

THE RESULT – SAP BW AND BI MIGRATION

Through the Azure Cloud KAUST now also has options for monitoring and visualization that gives valuable insights on the overall performance and allow them greater control:

With the latest software versions for SAP Analytics in place and enabled by SAP HANA, the KAUST dashboard and data load performance improved drastically providing University management with a more agile decision-making capability. Furthermore, the cloud implementation allows for better interoperability with SAP Analytics Cloud which can now exploit data directly from BW. Additionally, the SAP BI platform is ready for Live Connections to Universes and WebI if needed.

The high-performance Azure infrastructure provides scalability and flexibility with high availability and the best Service Level Agreements in the market, with corporate data fully owned by KAUST and safely protected with the highest levels of access security.

KAUST has taken the first step towards the goal of adopting SAP BW/4HANA as part of their mid-term strategy to create a new scalable and multisource system and is considering the inclusion of unstructured data and many other data sources to achieve big data scenarios.

Reference

Image 1: KAUST Campus - https://www.kaust.edu.sa/en

Image 2: Azure Monitor - https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/monitor/