SAP Data Warehousing Solutions: an October 2011 Review

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.

SAP BusinessObjects: Through the Eyes of Critics and Clients

In our day-to-day life we are exposed to many purchasing decisions. Going to the supermarket to get some food or buying widgets in an internet shop is no longer a quick and easy task. The diversification of vendors forces us to go through a conscious or unconscious decision making process. It is always interesting to study the reasoning that leads to an action, especially for marketing people, and it is a social phenomenon in constant evolution, ranging from the traditional word of mouth to the most modern surfing of internet forums.

The same happens when a company has the opportunity to make a BI investment and has to choose a vendor that fulfills their particular needs. There are some specialized consulting companies that carry out complex market studies, but the feedback received from clients or contacts is just as influential to the decision making process.

This blog article is focused on the latest studies from Gartner and Forrester regarding SAP BusinessObjects.

The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms, released during the last quarter of 2010, considers SAP BusinessObjects to be leading the market together with IBM Cognos, Oracle and Information Builders, followed by SAS, Microsoft and MicroStrategy close behind. The 145 criteria used correspond to vendor surveys, product demos and customer reference surveys.  The end result is a graph that situates BI vendors in relation to their current offering and strategy.

SAP BusinessObjects is recognized as having very good BI tools for each job:

• Crystal Reports as top report writer embedded in thousands of applications;

• Explorer as a combination of the power of OLAP and the simplicity of search, exploration and analysis;

• SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards is very popular amongst executives that can visualize the generated flash in disconnected mode and no SAP software installed;

• BEx being still the most widely used and popular query and analysis tool for SAP BW users;

• Business Warehouse Accelerator with the speed of in-memory database to provide a powerful DBMS optimized for BI;

• SAP is also leading in self-service BI software as a service (SaaS) offerings.

According to Forrester, the downside of having all these tools is a poor product integration and a lack of object reuse from product to product, which is supposed to be improved with the new release BI 4.0 in Q1 2011.

Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms, released in January 2011, considers the same leader vendors as Forrester and also adds QlikTech thanks to its recent continued growth. It uses standard criteria divided into two categories: completeness of vision and ability to execute. According to the study, a good strength is to have the largest share of the BI platform market (combination of SAP NetWeaver BW and SAP BusinessObjects) with an installed base over 46,000 customers and one of the largest channel and services ecosystems. Reporting and ad-hoc querying capabilities were rated high by customers, whereas other SAP NetWeaver BW tools were below the market average. However, in regards to OLAP, BEx Analyzer seems to be more widely used than Voyager. The complements to the BI platform are also seen as positive: collaboration and decision support (StreamWork), Text Analysis, search-based data exploration with its Explorer product, and the enterprise information management products with data integration, lineage & impact analysis, and data quality. The vision for an in-memory appliance, HANA, promises to solve many of the perennial performance issues of large complex BI deployments in general (given its SQL and MDX access for third-party BI tools) and SAP BW in particular. As also reported by Forrester, SAP has been one of the first of the leading BI vendors to introduce a SaaS offering, BusinessObjects OnDemand BI. In addition, SAP has also made investments in mobile BI with its Sybase acquisition and the SAP BusinessObjects Explorer iPhone/iPad application.

In the cautions part of the report, Gartner mentions some concerns that customers have about the roadmap after product changes to support optimizations with the SAP Business Applications and NetWeaver BW products, and also a perceived higher cost of ownership. Migration, implementation and integration choices are reported to be confusing by some customers. Finally, ratings for support, software quality and sales experience are unfortunately low compared to other vendors in the survey. This is currently being address by SAP; they are giving more and more importance to Channel Partners like Clariba, which can provide high quality uninterrupted support, much more aligned to the customer needs.

If you have any questions or comments about the Gartner or Forrester summaries mentioned in this article, or would like more information about Clariba’s SAP BusinessObjects services, please leave a comment below or contact us at info@clariba.com.

Connecting SAP BW and BusinessObjects Data Integrator for data extraction

In follow up to my blog article on July 7, I would like to share some insight for connecting SAP BW and SAP BusinessObjects Data Integrator for the purposes of data extraction.   

 The problem that I encountered was that I could not connect my BODS to SAP BW. The connection was correctly created into the Management console of Data Integrator but the start up was always failing. 

After what seemed like hundreds of tests and commands from the cmd, I found the solution: the services file contained in the same path as the host file (windows/system32/drivers/etc) requires a small change:

1. You need to add the following string SAPGWxx  33xx/tcp where xx is the system number of your SAP connection.
2. Then here I also configured the sapjco3.jar that is stored in tomcat (you will find it with an easy search in the folder) in the Tomcat CLASSPATH as per the previous topic posted on July 7.

To start the service I used a command from the cmd in the location: Drive:Business ObjectsBusiness Objects Data Servicesbin: RfcSvr -aRFC_ProgramID -g/H/ip or name of the SAP Application Server name/S/33xx -xsapgwxx   RfcSvr is the .exe file that starts the DI processes. If you want to know more details regarding this command, the best way is to do a quick search in Google.

After following the steps above, everything should work fine. At this point, you can use BW cubes as your data source in Data Integrator.

If you have any questions or feedback to add to this quick solution, please feel free to leave a comment below.

Connection between SAP BW and Universe Designer / BusinessObjects InfoView

In this blog post I will explain some tips that I learned while integrating SAP BusinessObjects Universe Designer/Infoview with SAP BW.

For the most part, the steps should be simple and quite standard (unless you face some unexpected issues).   First of all you need to install the platform and the integration kit for SAP. At the end of this process you will see that you can create universes on top of BW cubes or BW queries. You can easily publish the universe and retrieve your data in a report.

Now in theory, after configuring the user in the CMC (BO CMC --> Authentications --> SAP) a user should be able to log in to SAP BusinessObjects InfoView using his/her SAP credentials…

But in reality BusinessObjects will fail while importing the roles of the SAP user. Why? Because you will need a java connector, which doesn't come with the “out of the box” integration kit.

All you need to do is download the files from SAP (or from the bottom of this blog post), and make them available for your system.   Here a step by step guide:

1. Create the folders in your tomcat55 parent folder called Sharedlib
2. Copy there the sapjco.jar and the .dll files
3. Copy the .dll files into Windows/system32
4. Go to Tomcat configuration and add the complete path of the file sapjco.jar to the CLASSPATH string - restart tomcat

Notes: Do not confuse the sapjco.jar with other versions in the folder. Download the 32bit version even if your machine is a 64bit.   Now try to import your user's role in BO CMC --> Authentications --> SAP again and you will see that everything will work as expected.

If you have any questions or feedback about this solution, please let me know by leaving a comment below.

> Download this Shared file (contains sapjco.jar and the .dll files)