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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Microsoft Azure

    Score8.6 out of 10
    N/AMicrosoft Azure is a cloud computing platform and infrastructure for building, deploying, and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters.

    $29

    per month

    SAP BW/4HANA

    Score8.3 out of 10
    N/ASAP BW/4HANA is a next-generation data warehouse solution. It is specifically designed to use the advanced in-memory capabilities of the SAP HANA platform. For example, SAP BW/HANA can integrate many different data sources to provide a single, logical view of all the data. This could include data contained in SAP and non-SAP applications running on-premise or in the cloud, and data lakes, such as those contained in the Apache Hadoop open-source software framework. With SAP BW/4HANA,…N/A
    Pricing
    Microsoft AzureSAP BW/4HANA
    Editions & Modules
    Developer
    $29
    per month
    Standard
    $100
    per month
    Professional Direct
    $1000
    per month
    Basic
    Free
    per month
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Microsoft AzureSAP BW/4HANA
    Free Trial
    YesNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    YesNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoYes
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
    Additional DetailsThe free tier lets users have access to a variety of services free for 12 months with limited usage after making an Azure account.—
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Microsoft AzureSAP BW/4HANA
    Considered Both Products
    Microsoft
    No answer on this topic
    SAP
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    92%
    Would buy again
    34 Answers
    100%
    Would buy again
    12 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    94%
    Delivers good value for the price
    31 Answers
    92%
    Delivers good value for the price
    11 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    95%
    Happy with the feature set
    35 Answers
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    12 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    89%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    24 Answers
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    10 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    94%
    Implementation went as expected
    34 Answers
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    11 Answers
    Features
    Microsoft AzureSAP BW/4HANA
    Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
    Comparison of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) features of Microsoft Azure and SAP BW/4HANA
    Feature
    Microsoft Azure
    8.4
    27 Ratings
    2% above category average
    SAP BW/4HANA
    -
    Ratings
    Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime8.126 Ratings00 Ratings
    Dynamic scaling8.725 Ratings00 Ratings
    Elastic load balancing8.624 Ratings00 Ratings
    Pre-configured templates8.225 Ratings00 Ratings
    Monitoring tools8.326 Ratings00 Ratings
    Pre-defined machine images8.424 Ratings00 Ratings
    Operating system support8.926 Ratings00 Ratings
    Security controls8.626 Ratings00 Ratings
    Automation8.224 Ratings00 Ratings
    Access Control and Security
    Comparison of Access Control and Security features of Microsoft Azure and SAP BW/4HANA
    Feature
    Microsoft Azure
    -
    Ratings
    SAP BW/4HANA
    9.2
    4 Ratings
    2% above category average
    Multi-User Support (named login)00 Ratings9.74 Ratings
    Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)00 Ratings9.74 Ratings
    Single Sign-On (SSO)00 Ratings9.74 Ratings
    Location-Based Data Governance00 Ratings8.04 Ratings
    Data Modeling
    Comparison of Data Modeling features of Microsoft Azure and SAP BW/4HANA
    Feature
    Microsoft Azure
    -
    Ratings
    SAP BW/4HANA
    9.7
    4 Ratings
    0% above category average
    Data model creation00 Ratings9.74 Ratings
    Data Exploration
    Comparison of Data Exploration features of Microsoft Azure and SAP BW/4HANA
    Feature
    Microsoft Azure
    -
    Ratings
    SAP BW/4HANA
    9.0
    3 Ratings
    13% above category average
    Visualization00 Ratings9.03 Ratings
    Data Warehouse
    Comparison of Data Warehouse features of Microsoft Azure and SAP BW/4HANA
    Feature
    Microsoft Azure
    -
    Ratings
    SAP BW/4HANA
    8.5
    4 Ratings
    1% below category average
    High-Volume Data Processing00 Ratings9.74 Ratings
    Data Warehouse Management00 Ratings10.04 Ratings
    Administrative Automation00 Ratings7.53 Ratings
    Self-Optimization00 Ratings7.03 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    Microsoft AzureSAP BW/4HANA
    Small Businesses
    IBM Cloud Object Storage
    Score9 out of 10
    No answers on this topic
    Medium-sized Companies
    IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers
    Score8.7 out of 10
    Cloudera Enterprise Data Hub
    Score9 out of 10
    Enterprises
    SAP on IBM Cloud
    Score9 out of 10
    Oracle Exadata
    Score9.8 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Microsoft AzureSAP BW/4HANA
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.7
    (96 ratings)
    9.7
    (12 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    10.0
    (17 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Usability
    8.3
    (36 ratings)
    9.7
    (5 ratings)
    Availability
    6.8
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    9.0
    (27 ratings)
    9.7
    (7 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    8.0
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Microsoft AzureSAP BW/4HANA
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Microsoft
    Azure is particularly well suited for enterprise environments with existing Microsoft investments, those that require robust compliance features, and organizations that need hybrid cloud capabilities that bridge on-premises and cloud infrastructure. In my opinion, Azure is less appropriate for cost-sensitive startups or small businesses without dedicated cloud expertise and scenarios requiring edge computing use cases with limited connectivity. Azure offers comprehensive solutions for most business needs but can feel like there is a higher learning curve than other cloud-based providers, depending on the product and use case.
    Read full review
    SAP
    SAP BW/4HANA is certainly an excellent choice when it comes to setting up a data warehousing platform within a landscape of existing SAP systems ecosystem for realizing quick time to value and ROI over the long term. Many non-SAP analytics tools such as Power BI , Qlik also now offer connectors to leverage SAP BW/4HANA data as additional options to deploy third party visualization tools which make it a more open ended platform of choice. But with the future roadmap of SAP and industry in general being focused towards cloud based offerings (SAC and Datasphere) infused with AI capabilities one has to make a judicious choice among these depending on the use case, capabilities of platforms and existing systems landscape and the overall long term IT strategy. SAP BW/4HANA may not be a good platform of choice if starting a native greenfield data warehousing implementation with cloud first approach which would require data integration across SAP and Non-SAP sources and one should consider other SAP cloud offerings which however still have some time to reach a level of maturity as SAP BW/4HANA has reached over the years.
    Incentivized
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    Pros
    Microsoft
    • Microsoft Azure is highly scalable and flexible. You can quickly scale up or down additional resources and computing power.
    • You have no longer upfront investments for hardware. You only pay for the use of your computing power, storage space, or services.
    • The uptime that can be achieved and guaranteed is very important for our company. This includes the rapid maintenance for security updates that are mostly carried out by Microsoft.
    • The wide range of capabilities of services that are possible in Microsoft Azure. You can practically put or create anything in Microsoft Azure.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    SAP
    • With ODP based extraction, SAP BW/4HANA does well to integrate the data from various source systems like S4HANA , S4C.
    • With composite providers having the ability to integrate HANA calculation views, we are able to make the best of use of both application layer and data base layer(HANA) for mixed modelling scenarios.
    • with data tiering optimization higher data volume are effectively handled as we have the option to control the amount of data that is being stored in HOT , Warm and cold storage. With data volume grows over the year, DTO comes in handy solution to automatically move the delta to appropriate area based on temporature.
    Incentivized
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    Cons
    Microsoft
    • The cost of resources is difficult to determine, technical documentation is frequently out of date, and documentation and mapping capabilities are lacking.
    • The documentation needs to be improved, and some advanced configuration options require research and experimentation.
    • Microsoft's licensing scheme is too complex for the average user, and Azure SQL syntax is too different from traditional SQL.
    Read full review
    SAP
    • Better integration with HANA layer with BW/4HANA application
    • Flexibility to provide more secure API's to interact with non-sap Data bases
    • Integration with Gsheets as well like Excel(AFO) and introduce better reporting integration with various reporting tools.
    • Evolution to provide better data lake , data brick options like in BDC
    Incentivized
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    Likelihood to Renew
    Microsoft
    Moving to Azure was and still is an organizational strategy and not simply changing vendors. Our product roadmap revolved around Azure as we are in the business of humanitarian relief and Azure and Microsoft play an important part in quickly and efficiently serving all of the world. Migration and investment in Azure should be considered as an overall strategy of an organization and communicated companywide.
    Read full review
    SAP
    No answers on this topic
    Usability
    Microsoft
    As Microsoft Azure is [doing a] really good with PaaS. The need of a market is to have [a] combo of PaaS and IaaS. While AWS is making [an] exceptionally well blend of both of them, Azure needs to work more on DevOps and Automation stuff. Apart from that, I would recommend Azure as a great platform for cloud services as scale.
    Incentivized
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    SAP
    SAP BW/4HANA requires specialized skillsets around data warehouse modeling and the access to data, however the modeling capabilities are intuitive and have now become accessible to both SAP and non-SAP data warehouse specialists. This new model allows for Interchangeable skillsets and access to a broader pool of experts throughout the industry, as well as easier access to data.
    Incentivized
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    Reliability and Availability
    Microsoft
    It has proven to be unreliable in our production environment and services become unavailable without proper notification to system administrators
    Incentivized
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    SAP
    No answers on this topic
    Support Rating
    Microsoft
    We were running Windows Server and Active Directory, so [Microsoft] Azure was a seamless transition. We ran into a few, if any support issues, however, the availability of Microsoft Azure's support team was more than willing and able to guide us through the process. They even proposed solutions to issues we had not even thought of!
    Incentivized
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    SAP
    SAP Max Attention and general support for SAP BW/4HANA is broadly available. Truth to be told, MaxAttention has a premium cost but brings great engineers. So this being an enterprise capability and extremely critical, we did not consider cost as the main factor since support works well. Just keep that in mind when making your selection.
    Incentivized
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    Implementation Rating
    Microsoft
    As I have mentioned before the issue with my Oracle Mismatch Version issues that have put a delay on moving one of my platforms will justify my 7 rating.
    Read full review
    SAP
    No answers on this topic
    Alternatives Considered
    Microsoft
    As I continue to evaluate the "big three" cloud providers for our clients, I make the following distinctions, though this gap continues to close. AWS is more granular, and inherently powerful in the configuration options compared to [Microsoft] Azure. It is a "developer" platform for cloud. However, Azure PowerShell is helping close this gap. Google Cloud is the leading containerization platform, largely thanks to it building kubernetes from the ground up. Azure containerization is getting better at having the same storage/deployment options.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    SAP
    SAP BW / 4HANA and SAP IQ are both used for warehouse; with quick consultations for business analysis and that allows us to obtain dashboards and KPIs efficiently. SAP IQ is columnar and SAP BW / 4HANA immemorial. SAP BW / 4HANA was selected for the response speed of the queries since it saves the information in cache.
    Incentivized
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    Return on Investment
    Microsoft
    • For about 2 years we didn't have to do anything with our production VMs, the system ran without a hitch, which meant our engineers could focus on features rather than infrastructure.
    • DNS management was very easy in Azure, which made it easy to upgrade our cluster with zero downtime.
    • Azure Web UI was easy to work with and navigate, which meant our senior engineers and DevOps team could work with Azure without formal training.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    SAP
    • SAP BW/4HANA has been immensely helpful in eliminating alternate silos of data creation by business users thereby ensuring data integrity and consistency across the organization. The focus is now more on data analysis as opposed to data preparation in spreadsheets saving users hours of laborious manual work in collating data.
    • We have been able to quickly integrate and leverage data from multiple SAP systems into SAP BW/4HANA to drive holistic decision making within the organization including streamlining the month end close process using BPC.
    • Excel friendly reporting tools such as Analysis for Office have made it much easier for user adoption and training making change management much easier and change the culture within the organization.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots

    SAP BW/4HANA Screenshots

    Screenshot of Next generation data warehousing with SAP BW/4HANA.Screenshot of SAP BW/4HANA user cockpit.Screenshot of Geolocation analytics in SAP BW/4HANA.Screenshot of Data modeling in SAP BW/4HANA.Screenshot of Modern user experience in SAP BW/4HANA.Screenshot of Monitor the performance of your business in real-time with SAP BW/4HANA.