SAP Datasphere – The End of SAP Business Warehouse?

SAP BW customers who are considering modernizing their data warehouse by introducing SAP BW/4HANA are faced with the question of whether this is (still) advisable. There is no blanket answer to this question. As is so often the case, it depends on the initial situation and the time horizon. Among other things, the following aspects can play a role in the decision-making process:

• How large and complex is the current SAP BW system?
• How satisfied are you with the existing system?
• In which overall architecture is the SAP BW system integrated?
• How much SAP BW expertise is already available in the development team? How much effort is involved in transferring expertise?
• What is the goal of IT modernization?
• Can SAP Datasphere already meet current requirements?
• Is SAP BW Bridge already suitable as a migration scenario?

In our experience, customers pursue different strategies. There are customers, such as our customer BARMER, who are completely replacing their HR SAP BW system with SAP Datasphere. 

Other customers are consciously choosing to migrate their SAP BW system to SAP BW/4HANA, for example because they have already invested a lot of money in the system and/or because the complexity is (still) too high for SAP Datasphere. Given the impending end of maintenance for SAP BW, some customers cannot wait until SAP Datasphere is a fully-fledged option. We also consider this to be a valid option, as the time horizon until 2040 is still very long and migration to SAP Datasphere is also possible at a later date.

Many of our customers also rely on hybrid scenarios —that is, combining existing architectures (including SAP BW) with SAP Datasphere. Our customer projects range from pure self-service environments for specialist departments to outsourcing the reporting layer to SAP Datasphere. The driving factor is usually the need for greater flexibility. We consider hybrid scenarios in particular to be a project-proven approach to enabling added value beyond classic SAP BW.

One example scenario is the use of SAP Datasphere for self-service data preparation. We see a lot of potential here thanks to user-friendly data modeling. SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) does not offer comprehensive data preparation capabilities – nor does SAP BW/4HANA. We often see departments looking for other solutions that are not integrated into the IT system landscape. Datasphere can therefore fill this gap very well and offers departments a high degree of freedom while integrating them into the IT system architecture. The diagram below outlines how the interaction between an enterprise data warehouse (EDW), other solutions, and Datasphere can work. For example, IT can provide an IT-governed space with quality-assured data models for standard reports. Based on this, custom extensions can be created in the line of business spaces. We can well imagine Datasphere functioning as a virtual semantic layer across all systems, as shown in Figure 2.