Category: BW

This ASUG webcast described how to build a Business Objects universe on SAP Hana and covered the benefits and best practices of connecting to SAP HANA with BI/BusinessObjects.

Steve Lucas (General Manager Business Analytics and Technology at SAP) published a blog post with the title “Putting Mobile First and the New Business Intelligence Priorities”. His blog post contains a numerous of topics on mobile SAP BusinessObjects BI solutions including an overview slide of the strategy for 2012 which is displayed below. Though, there is one specific message that stands out.

We reveal how you can integrate SAP HANA into your IT landscape, what size models and servers are available, and the databases on which the appliance will run. There are many deployment scenarios for SAP HANA: It can be used as an accelerator or as a database or as a basis for applications. The SAP HANA appliance comprises software and hardware. In terms of hardware, SAP works with server providers such as HP, IBM, Fujitsu, Cisco, and Dell.

In-memory and column-store technologies of SAP HANA provide new capabilities for planning use-cases. This blog describes how BW-IP was used as starting point to leverage this new technology. And how the fully compatible 'planning applications kit' evolved, combining the strength of feature-rich BW-IP and highly optimized SAP HANA.

In his TECHED / SAPPHIRE NOW keynote, Vishal had invited Red Bull to show the first BW-on-HANA system running at a customer site. While one can argue that this effort has been realized with some of the best experts that are available it has not been rocket science and is an excellent showcase of how things can work out if properly planned and implemented. This blog documents the process.

I've worked across many clients and seen a lot of changes in the SAP world over the years so I'm not the easiest person to get excited about new versions of software that are often heavy on re-branding of old functionality and light on step changes that significantly benefit to our clients.

One of my personal goals this year was to ensure that Bluefin Solutions was the first SAP Partner to showcase SAP NetWeaver BW 7.3, powered by SAP HANA. This is exactly what we will be doing this week at the SAP UK & Ireland User Group conference in Birmingham.

Allison Levine, senior SAP BI programmer, analyst and ASUG Enterprise Data Warehousing SIG chair discusses BEx strategy and which functions to migrate to SAP BusinessObjects applications.

On November 7th, SAP will release the new version of its in-memory database - the much heralded Project Orange, or SAP HANA 1.0 SP03. They'll probably change the name before I publish this article, but hey. Project Orange is huge - because it's not just the kind of theoretical analytics appliance that we have available with the current SAP HANA 1.0 SP02. It's a complete replacement for the Microsoft, Oracle or IBM database that SAP requires to underpin its Business Information Warehouse, SAP NetWeaver BW.

Sarat Atluri was part of the winning team at this year's InnoJam, held as part of the SAUG Summit in Sydney. Here he tells what it was like to work 30 hours straight and learn HANA overnight.  "Success is 99 per cent failure." - Soichire Honda. During the 30 hours non-stop bliss, we failed more times than we succeeded, so did all the other teams. In the end, the lessons we learnt from the failures are the ones that led us to produce a successful prototype while enhancing and enriching our knowledge. Winning the trophy was a bonus. If I think back to the reasons why I attended InnoJam, in the order of my priority, they were: 1.    If not for InnoJam, I may not have been able to get my hands on HANA for a few more years (unless I enrolled for a training course, paying a few thousand dollars). 2.    For 30 hours I can have face-to-face interaction with the best SAP brains on the planet 3.    I can work on HANA without the hassle of having to install it. 4.    The opportunity to meet like-minded people in the SAP community. 5.    Feel and share the passion that ...

While SAP's HANA-based architecture will force competitors to show their hands on their application infrastructure strategies, selling its most conservative customers on the potentially disruptive impact of its HANA-led architecture will be a key challenge ahead, according to a new Gartner report. The report, titled 'SAP Throws Down the Next Generation Architecture Gauntlet with HANA', discusses SAP's long-term application infrastructure strategy, based on in-memory computing, mobility and cloud. "This initiative is a bold attempt to effect a generational change for the company, and to allow it to compete with industry and thought-leading architectures. The vision is very ambitious, and, at the same time, consistent with users' aspirations," the report said. "SAP's vision will force megavendor competitors to respond by clearly and openly articulating their cloud and in-memory computing strategies."   However, Gartner also highlighted the hurdles ahead for SAP in making its new strategy a success. "In addition to addressing formidable technology and go-to-market challenges, SAP will have to introduce its highly innovative vision in a way that will be acceptable to the most conservative part of its customer base." Despite these challenges, the report indicated that the HANA architecture "likely will have a significant industry impact", and ...

This is my experience developing a Dashboard Design (Xcelsius) dashboard running directly on a SAP-BW system.