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How does all this work together – BW, BW on HANA, Suite on

HANA, HANA Live….. Part 4
Posted by Ingo Hilgefort in BusinessObjects BI for SAP on Jun 8, 2013 1:40:32 AM
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Just in case you missed the first parts, here you can find:

 Part 1 - which discusses the set of different customer landscapes and a non-SAP OLTP landscape
 Part 2 - which discusses a customer with SAP ERP (not ERP on HANA)
 Part 3 - which discusses a customer with SAP ERP on SAP HANA

So this time let's discuss the options for a customer in landscape #4, so a customer which has a heterogeneous landscape deployed
with some parts being SAP and some parts non-SAP.

Figure 1: Current landscape #4

Remember - the goal of this blog is to discuss, how a customer with such a landscape could now leverage SAP HANA, but ...
...our customer already has SAP HANA.

As shown in Figure 1, our customer uses SAP ERP on SAP HANA and a non-SAP OLTP environment and there might even be other
data sources out there.

Lets put this into an actual scenario, so lets work with the assumption that:

 Our customer uses the SAP BusinessSuite to cover the Finance aspect of his business
 Our customer uses a non-SAP ERP system - like Oracle, Salesforce, ... - for the Sales aspect of his business
 Our customer uses a relational data base for some credit history and some credit rating information about his customers

Our requirement now is to provide our VP of sales to provide an answer to the question if there are opportunities in the sales pipeline
where our VP of sales should consider giving a bigger discount to the customer to close the deal in the last days of the quarter.
 Now that means we need:
 the data from the SAP BusinessSuite for the open invoices and open orders
 the data from the non-SAP OLTP system for the current pipeline
 the data from the database for credit history and credit ranking

Figure 2

The first option to solve our problem could be to create a Data Mart and to combine the sales data coming from the non-SAP OLTP
environment combined with the credit history and credit ranking information stored in the 3rd party database.

With SAP BusinessSuite on SAP HANA we could also create a agile data mart (virtual or physical) inside of SAP HANA giving us
access to the Finance data.

...but that does not really solve our problem, we just reduced the number of data sources from three (SAP BusinessSuite on SAP
HANA, 3rd party OLTP, 3rd party data source) to two data source - but no data federation (see Figure 2).
 Figure 3 Federation in Semantic Layer

Our goal is to present a combined set of information - Finance, Sales, Credit History - , so we need to combine the information in one
of the software layers we have in our landscape. Figure 3 shows the first option we are using by leveraging the SAP BusinessObjects
BI suite and the data federation capabilities of the semantic layer.

We can leverage the semantic layer of the SAP BusinessObjects BI suite and create a so called multi-source Universe and in that way
we would be able to present a combination of the data.

Advantages of the approach (Figure 3):

 Data can be combined before "hitting" the reporting layer so that the business user sees one combined set of data

Disadvantages of the approach (Figure 3):

 Not all of the BI client tools are able to leverage a Universe as data source, so we would not be able to use Analysis, edition for
Microsoft Office, Analysis, edition for OLAP, Design Studio
 Figure 4 Consolidate in SAP HANA

In Figure 4 we are looking at an alternative for our problem. The customer is using SAP BusinessSuite on SAP HANA, so we could
also leverage the capabilities of SAP HANA to solve our problem. We would like to present one set of information to our business
users, so for now in SAP HANA that would mean that we would like to use one SAP HANA model that has access to all the required
information.

We already looked at the option of creating a virtual or physical data mart on top of SAP ERP on SAP HANA in Part 3 of this series,
so I won't repeat this here.

In addition to the Finance data from the SAP BusinessSuite we would then load the data from the non-SAP OLTP and the 3rd party
data source into the SAP HANA system (see Figure 4).

Now with all the data available in SAP HANA we are able to either create a complete new SAP HANA model, but we could also
leverage existing models from SAP HANA Live and extend them to combine the SAP BusinessSuite data with the information we
loaded into SAP HANA for the sales and credit information.

Advantages of the approach (Figure 4):

 All data is available in a single place, which allows to create one set of security, one set of data models, ...

Disadvantages of the approach (Figure 4):

 We need to extract the data from the source and load it into SAP HANA, which is more effort and not really "real time" anymore
 Figure 5 Federation with SAP HANA

So looking at Figure 4 we are able to solve our problem and we are able to deliver the required information to our business, so we
could stop here, but as I mentioned in the disadvantages, this also means that we need to extract the information from the source and
load it into SAP HANA...

.... and that might not always be what our customers are looking for.

Before I continue now with Figure 5, please be aware that the next paragraph refers to future capabilities that are not available yet
and the usual disclaimer applies here.

Figure 5 shows something that is being worked on right now, where SAP HANA allows you to federate data that is "inside" of SAP
HANA with data "outside" of SAP HANA - so basically like a virtual data model inside of SAP HANA.

So how does our customer in landscape #4 benefit from items, such as SAP HANA Live, and SAP BusinessSuite on SAP HANA :

Right now our customer is able to leverage SAP HANA as an agile data modeling environment and can quickly create a combination
of data from SAP ERP and non-SAP data. Yes - given right now the data from the non-SAP environment needs to be loaded into
SAP HANA as well, but as shown in Figure 5 in future that will not always be a requirement anymore with the upcoming federation
capabilities in SAP HANA.

If you think this material is helpful, please share it further and rate / like the blog post.
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 4 Comments


Ina Felsheim Jun 11, 2013 11:44 PM
Excellent summary, Ingo, It's critical to point out, as you do, that many of our solutions work very well with non-SAP
sources and targets. Thanks for putting this together!
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
Joyce Butler Jun 21, 2013 2:50 PM
Great series, Ingo. Much needed clarity. Thank you
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Lorato Ludo Kenosi Jun 26, 2013 12:32 PM
Ingo,

Are you still to talk about landscape #6 or i missed it somewhere in between? I am more interested in BWonHANA...i
need to understand how it works.

Many thanks,
Ludo
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o
Ingo Hilgefort Jun 26, 2013 4:21 PM (in response to Lorato Ludo Kenosi)
Hello Ludo,

up to landscape #5 have been published. In case you interested in BW on HANA and how BW on HANA
works, I would also suggest you look at the material here available on SDN

regards
Ingo Hilgefort, SAP