SAP BW/4HANA vs. SAP Data Intelligence

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

If you have an SAP products ecosystem in your IT landscape, it becomes a no-brainer to go ahead with an SAP Data Intelligence product for your data orchestration, data management, and advanced data analytics needs, such as data preparation for your AI/ML processes. It provides a seamless integration with other SAP products.

Incentivized

• High speed data warehouse regardless of data volumes.
• Excellent integration with SAP systems and Data sets.
• Simplified data modelling due to columnar data base.

Incentivized

• It integrates well with our current ecosystem of SAP products, like HANA.
• It provides end-to-end machine learning operations, with tools for the complete model life cycle.
• It has a simple user interface for novice users, with complex tools also available for power users.
• It builds on SAP Data Hub, providing all the ETL functions of that tool with additional machine learning functionality.
• It can run in the cloud, no on-premise software management needed.
• Many programming languages are supported, it provides a sandbox environment for the user to develop in whichever style they prefer.
• SAP is very actively developing and improving it.

Incentivized

• Enterprise license pricing is very expensive and run-time license limits the usefulness of the tool.
• Integration with SAP Analytics cloud for write-back to BW/4HANA. Live connection is only read from SAC.
• Make run-time licenses more useful.

Incentivized

• Data transfer speed tends to be slow when there is poor internet connection since SAP Data Intelligence don’t synchronize data while offline. However, this is not vendor fault, that’s why we have implemented robust wireless technology internet connection in our organization.

Incentivized

Allow collaborations among various personas
with insights as ratings and comments on the
datasets Reuse knowledges on the datasets for new users Next-Gen Data Management and Artificial Intelligence

Incentivized

SAP BW/4HANA is a well-designed data warehousing solution that has matured over the years with even more capabilities esp. on the HANA platform making it a compelling choice for SAP customers. It is very well thought out both in design and development aspects from an IT standpoint as well as usability from a business user standpoint with excellent performance driven by HANA. It also goes beyond just analytics and offers data mining and planning capabilities that make it even more compelling.

Incentivized

I think the troubleshooting process might be streamlined with improved error recording and tracing. A lot of information about issues and how to fix them is hidden away in the Kubernetes pods themselves. I'm not sure whether SAP Data Intelligence can fix this problem it may be connected to Kubernetes's design, in which case fixing it could need modifications inside Kubernetes itself.

Incentivized

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

Initially we struggle to get help from SAP but then dedicated Dev angel was assigned to us and that simplify the overall support scenario. There is still room of improvement in documentation around SAP Data intelligence. We struggle a lot to initially understand the feature and required help around performance improvement area,

Incentivized

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

One of the reasons to pick SAP Data Intelligence is the speed and security it provides, in addition to the excellent support it provides. It is also compatible with all popular databases, which is another reason to choose it.

Incentivized

• Positive impact on the availability of information for decision making.
• Avoid the need for multiple databases for isolated data warehouses within the organization.
• Immediate availability of information for managers and business users.

Incentivized

• Automation of data management slashed tasks by over 60% in most departments for the first 8 months.
• Metadata catalogs have enabled us to categorize data from disjointed sources in one place.
• It runs multiple ML models which enhances flexibility when managing data.

Incentivized