In today’s digital age, data is the core of any organization and business. It has become a prime necessity to collect and preserve this data, the cloud platforms become the efficient need of the digital world. However, several times the data value is lost in the endless pursuit of collecting data. This is where the SAP datasphere adds value. It saves the value of data without the need to transfer it from one technology to another. SAP Datasphere makes a compelling solution for organizations to utilize the power of their business data. It streamlines the operation and offers the promise of scalability, accessibility, and cost-effectiveness.
What is SAP Datasphere?
SAP Datasphere is SAP’s latest offering for all data warehousing use cases in the public cloud. Datasphere with SAP BW/4HANA Private Cloud Edition (PCE) offers strategic solutions to enterprises helping them utilize the full potential of their business data including data integration, database, data warehouse, and analytic services. The SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) is based on the SAP HANA Cloud platform. SAP Datasphere simplifies data access for businesses across all landscapes which means no need to worry about the data location, they can use the data across hybrid and cloud environments.
What is SAP BW Bridge?
SAP BW Bridge is a component of SAP Datasphere offering an ABAP environment to BW customers. It makes the transition to the public cloud and SAP Datasphere seamless. The SAP BW bridge is a medium of connectivity for business, it enables SAP BW-based data extractors from SAP ECC and S/4HANA systems through ODP connection only.
BW bridge lets customers implement data warehousing use cases directly in the public cloud environment while protecting and retaining their existing on-premises investments. This helps customers reuse existing investments in SAP BW and allows them to transfer or enable rich features of extractors and ABAP code for access to legacy SAP on-premises systems.
Source: SAP
To purchase SAP BW Bridge customers, need to use an add-on license in the Datasphere tenant configuration.
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SAP BW Bridge enables SAP source system-based ODP data extraction including SAP ECC and SAP S/4HANA. Additionally, it enables staging capability within SAP HANA cloud that can be accessed as remote tables into Datasphere within dedicated BW Bridge space. The built-in connectors will directly connect ODP to SAP Datasphere.
Who can use SAP BW Bridge?
BW Bridge is best suited for customers on SAP BW 7.3 + and on BW/4HANA who wish to access their existing investment in the public cloud platform. The lower SAP BW release will require to be upgraded to the SAP BW system, before conversion to SAP BW Bridge on SAP Datasphere.
Conversion path to SAP Datasphere/BW Bridge
Conversion of existing SAP BW landscape to SAP Datasphere via BW Bridge can be done primarily using the following approaches:
- Greenfield migration: Customers building a new data warehouse in the public cloud with SAP Legacy systems ECC or S/4HANA as data sources that will only be migrated to a cloud-based system.
- Shell conversion: Customers with an SAP BW (SAP BW 7.3 and upwards, any DB and BW/4HANA) moving their data warehouse solution to the public cloud with their legacy data flows only. Users can optimize the data flow in the BW bridge and load data either from the BW system or from the source systems.
- Remote conversion: Customers with an SAP BW (SAP BW 7.3 and upwards and BW/4HANA) are moving their data warehouse solution to the public cloud expecting to retain their data, and legacy data flows.
Business value of SAP BW Bridge
The biggest value of the existing SAP BW is the accelerated transition to the public cloud through SAP BW Bridge implementation providing customers faster return on investment. Without such an alternative, customers would have to build their entire existing BW solution to SAP Datasphere from scratch.
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Additionally, creating a separate BW Bridge space within SAP Datasphere ensures the imported artifacts can be accessed easily, and securely. By using BW Bridge customers can begin to innovate with cloud technologies and apply semantic richness to their analytic solutions. This can be achieved seamlessly with the expertise and help of SAP’s trusted partners and industry experts.
Benefits of SAP Datasphere, BW Bridge
SAP Datasphere offers a plethora of benefits to businesses with critical data processing needs. It is an effective tool for data transformation no matter the location, let us look on some of the key benefits of Datasphere and BW bridge:
- SAP Datasphere is efficient for preserving the business context of the SAP data to be used for later integration, modeling, and analytics data preparation activities for business consumption.
- SAP Datasphere catalogue makes it easy for busy to govern data spread across different platforms and applications.
- SAP BW Bridge can transfer large components of data from older SAP BW systems to SAP Datasphere public that is both time and cost-efficient.
- Businesses benefit from easy integration of data from on-premises SAP Business Suite systems into SAP Datasphere.
- SAP BW bridge offers a seamless transition of data from on-premises SAP BW systems to the cloud.
- The SAP BW Bridge improves integration with SAP ERP systems.
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Limitation of SAP Datasphere, BW Bridge
Despite of plethora of data integration and migration benefits, there are still some limitations of SAP Datasphere and BW bridge to be considered like the ones mentioned below:
- It can only connect to ODP source systems.
- No support for the OLAP engine and functionality dependent on the OLAP engine.
- Planning is not supported in BW bridge. SAP Analytics Cloud is the planning application while Datasphere is the foundation for planning.
- For Datastore objects, cold store, and DTO handling are not supported.
- Composite Providers do not support temporal joins.
Summary
SAP has provided a seamless migration path to SAP Datasphere, BW Bridge for the existing data warehousing customers by keeping their investment safe, and secure, and not building everything from scratch. At the same time, the market also wants a single-target solution to reduce the system landscape complexity, data footprints, and costs. This is where the SAP BW bridge helps to accelerate the transition to public cloud data warehousing while protecting previous investments.