Insights

View full profileHerman Ohlhoff

Enterprise DW Lead & Head of Consulting (SA)
Bluefin Solutions

DS 4.0 - A quiet revolution that will change Data Warehousing as we know it

With SAP BusinessObjects' latest release of its Data Services suite, you can now connect Business Content extractors natively to DS, and by implication use business content to load any Data Warehouse (DW) system. If this looks like a small new technical feature with little impact then think again: For the first time in SAP's history it will be possible to use Business Content in any Data Warehouse environment and the content is no longer restricted to SAP's own Business Warehouse solution.

Why so quiet?

For the potential impact this could have on SAP BW as a choice of DW platform this feature received surprisingly little attention during the recent series of launch events for the 4.0 release. Or maybe we should say 'unsurprisingly' little attention.  Could it be that SAP is all too aware that the loss of this key selling point for SAP BW - i.e. it's native and superior integration with SAP source systems such as ECC and CRM - could seriously erode its competitiveness in the DW market?  Possibly.  But then again it begs the question of why SAP introduced this feature if it could prove so detrimental to their flagship Data Warehousing product?

The HANA factor

One obvious response may be that SAP does not view SAP BW as its flagship DW product any longer. HANA now has clearly taken than spot. In this light enabling Business Content to talk to DS makes perfect sense as the Data Integrator tool (part of the Data Services bundle) is shipped with HANA and is the only way other than using Sybase Replication Server (also shipped with HANA) to get data into the application. SAP is probably hoping more people will start using HANA than people who stop using BW...

Sybase IQ consuming business content

Then there is Sybase IQ. With Sybase IQ being part of SAP's portfolio now we can't imagine SAP would be too upset if IQ starts cannibalising market share from BW. This is likely to mean new licence revenue for them - not only for IQ, but also for Data Services.

IQ can almost be seen as a "poor-man's HANA", as it also offers significantly better performance and data compression than BW and is based on a similar columnar database design to HANA. Integration with SAP BusinessObjects BI is also in place and using Sybase Replication Server you could also deliver real-time reporting from IQ.  Ok it's not in-memory, but it will definitely be much cheaper than HANA. It will very likely be cheaper than BW too and definitely much faster.  Did I just hear someone say "Where do I sign?".

Where does this leave BW?

At this point, you may be thinking what some of our colleagues have recently suggested: RIP BW.  But don't write off BW just yet.  It is important to note that SAP BW is part of the HANA roadmap. Later this year SAP BW running on HANA will go into ramp-up.  As such HANA is seen as an enabling technology for SAP BW - not  a replacement.  This indicates an acknowledgement that in-memory technology in itself does not eliminate the need for or value of data warehousing per se. There may no longer be a need for some objects and new standards will apply for data staging. Still, there will be a need for an enterprise-wide data model and a central storage for all data and BW is still the place for this.

DS as the essential SAP ETL tool

So, back to the liberation of datasources in DS 4.0.  Despite what we've mentioned so far we believe there is a very simple and obvious reason why this feature was introduced: DS is primarily an ETL tool. Not only that, it is an SAP-owned ETL tool.  For the sake of its own reputation and pedigree in this space it seems obvious that DS having the ability to exploit existing ETL functions (i.e. datasources) in SAP's other systems should be expected. The change fits in with other improvements in the integration between DS and SAP implemented in the upgrade to DS 4.0  (such as the ability to talk to BI7 datasources, and the ability to call Process Chains from DS).

The fact that SAP made this change in spite of the possibility that it may have a knock-on effect on one of its other products is a good sign.  It means they are not just interested in delivering an estate of applications that work well with one another (only), but best of breed applications in each category. A similar observation can be made regarding the fact that HANA is an open application and supports SQL as well as MDX, which by implication allows competitors of SAP BusinessObjects BI access to it.

SAP BusinessObjects DS 4.0's ability to expose business content datasources to any data warehouse system took us by surprise at first, but ultimately makes good sense. It will introduce a host of new options and possibilities that we believe will be in the best interests of SAP's customers.  From that perspective it is a step forward and the right move by SAP.