SAP Business Information Warehouse

SAP Business Information Warehouse BY SAP AG (SAP BW) is the name of the Business Intelligence, analytical, reporting and Data Warehousing (DW) solution which is one of the major enterprise software applications produced by SAP AG. It was originally named SAP BIW, (Business Information Warehouse), but is now known as "SAP NetWeaver BI".

SAP BW consists among other things of components for data management ("Data Warehousing Workbench"), extensive data modeling capabilities, an embedded analytical engine, a suite of rich front-end analytical tools referred to as "Business Explorer" (BEx), and operational tools used for importing the most current transactional data into the system. It may be helpful to consider layers that make up the structure of SAP's BI solution:

* Extraction, Transformation and Load (ETL) layer - responsible for extracting data from a specific source, applying transformation rules, and loading it into SAP BW system.
*Data warehouse area - responsible for storing the information in various types of structures (e.g. Data Store Objects, InfoObjects and multidimensional structures called InfoCubes).
*Reporting - responsible for accessing the information in data warehouse area (and directly in source systems using virtual infoproviders) and presenting it in a user-friendly manner to the analyst or business user.
*Planning - Provides capabilities for the user to run simulations and perform tasks such as budget calculations.

SAP's BI application is a very pervasively employed data warehouse / analytical enterprise software solution, often utilized heavily by companies that essentially run their business on SAP operational systems such as SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (SAP ERP, traditionally known as SAP R/3). SAP's BI solution contains a large number of predefined "extractors", a very significant amount of pre-defined business content in the form of InfoCubes, master data (i.e. objects representing the entity for "Customer", or "Material"), authorization roles, query views and reports all delivered in the software by SAP. Some of the significant benefits of this approach include the ability to leverage SAP's substantial business knowledge from many years of developing extremely sophisticated software systems for the world's largest companies, typically shortening project development cycles in the process. The pre-defined business content can be modified to meet an organization's specific requirements, while at the same time taking advantage of general aspects of these delivered data models and reports that are somewhat foundational and have broad application in business, government, and education. SAP business content is usually used as a foundation upon which to build reports etc. and usually needs to be modified to meet the particular business requirements.

SAP BW is now part of a suite of SAP applications called SAP NetWeaver. Other components of SAP NetWeaver include SAP Enterprise Portal (EP, called SAP NetWeaver Portal as of Release 7.0), Web Application Server (WAS), SAP Process Integration (PI, or previously XI, i.e. eXchange Infrastructure) and Master Data Management (MDM). It also includes end-user reporting tools such as Report Designer, BEx Query Designer, and BEx Analyzer.

The 7.0 version of SAP BW was released in June 2006 as part of the SAP NetWeaver 7.0 (aka 2004s). This new release includes many new features, such as next-generation reporting and analytical features, major data warehousing enhancements, and possibility to use innovative technology for query performance optimization called "BI Accelerator". BI Accelerator (or BIA) comes as an external applicance, i.e. complete hardware with pre-installed software. BIA requires separate licence fee.

From SAP NetWeaver 7.0 on, the term SAP BW is obsolete, and instead it is referred simply as "SAP NetWeaver BI" - i.e. "SAP NetWeaver 7.0 BI".

Recently SAP acquired Business Objects, one of the premier reporting application software developers. SAP has indicated that Business Objects will operate as an independent entity to preserve the principle of application agnosticism, but also promised a tighter integration between SAP BI and Business Objects. A new BI roadmap was recently released by the combined entity. [Business Intelligence Platform Roadmap]

According to SAP, more than 12,000 installations of SAP's BI solution exist.

References

Further reading

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External links

* [http://www.sap.com/solutions/netweaver/components/bi/index.epx SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence]
* [https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/bi SAP BI on SAP Developers Network]
* [https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/go/portal/prtroot/docs/library/uuid/10c3bca6-7dbc-2a10-7aa8-81d2731c7bb1 Business Intelligence Platform Roadmap 2008]