October 21, 2019 | Mehmet Cekdemir
SAP BW 7.3 and 7.4 support maintenance will end in December 2020 (Previous versions are already out of support maintenance). Therefore, existing SAP BW customers need to plan their BW/4HANA conversion as of today.
SAP BW/4HANA is SAP’s next generation data warehouse solution and it is a new product built entirely on SAP HANA. As SAP underlines, converting an SAP BW system to SAP BW/4HANA is not a simple task and there is no wizard for this process. Therefore, a good project management and skilled personnel is required to execute a timely and efficient conversion.
SAP provides three paths for SAP BW/4HANA conversion:
- In-place Conversion
- Full system conversion of an existing SAP BW installation
- Step-by-step transfer of data models and flows to objects compatible with SAP BW/4HANA
- Followed by a system conversion to SAP BW/4HANA
- Prerequisite is SAP BW 7.5 powered by SAP HANA
- Remote Conversion
- Start with a brand-new SAP BW/4HANA installation
- Transport whole data flow or only selected data flows (including data)
- Risk reduced due to parallel systems
- Prerequisite is SAP BW 7.3 or later releases on any DB
- Shell Conversion
- Similar to Remote Conversion but without data transfer
- You can choose to load data from original sources, load data from existing SAP BW system, or simply you can ignore historical data and start fresh
- Prerequisite is SAP 7.0 or later releases on any DB
There are different paths available to customers for migration to SAP BW/4HANA. You can ask for advice on selecting the most appropriate path for your environment and start using a modern and simplified data warehouse, SAP BW/4HANA.
Get in touch for more information about SAP BW/4HANA conversion or any of SAP Analytics solutions: info@advisglobal.co.uk.