With around 50 speakers from major international companies like Siemens, ThyssenKrupp, T-Systems, Bosch Rexroth or SAP, the Transformation World 2016 focused on digital business transformation. Stampa Partners lead the discussion on the impact of HANA on Business Intelligence Architectures.

This year’s Transformation World conference, hosted by SNP AG, took place in the German city of Heidelberg on 21st and 22nd October. More then 50 speakers, mainly from major international SAP customers as well as from a few chosen solution providers and SAP presented their experiences with the transformation of business processes into the SAP Digital Core on the new HANA platform. Presentations and discussions were held on a very profound level.

BI-Transformation – How SAP HANA will change BI-Architectures

Stampa Partners was invited to hold a presentation and lead the discussion on the topic of “BI Transformation”.

Dr. Andreas Krueger and Hans-Peter Kammergruber took the audience through a short history lesson showing that the origin of what we know as a Data Warehouse today was in fact the low performance of database technologies in ERP-systems.

This bottleneck – the performance of the underlying database – was responsible for the strict separation of OLAP and OLTP systems.

OLAP-systems, once born, were then developed into the complex and sophisticated architectures which we know as Data Warehouses today. These Data Warehouses are currently facing increasingly problematic challenges:

• Increasing demand for sophisticated reports by functional departments
• High expectations with regards to report performance
• Requirement of realtime-reporting
• Flexible Analytics are requested
• Functional departments are looking for Self Service options
• TCO has to be reduced

How will BI-Architectures look like once SAP HANA is established? 

SAP HANA offers a range of new objects and tools to improve a Data Warehouse and to cope with some of the mentioned challenges. However, as Stampa Partners argued, this point of view is too restrictive. HANA removes the central bottleneck which was responsible for the creation of redundant data warehouses in the first place.

A very interesting discussion was: Will we still need physical Data Warehouses in the future? Which of today’s tasks of a DWH cannot be replaced by purely logical views on ERP data and other data sourced?

Dr. Krüger and Mr. Kammergruber presented a potential future architecture of a mainly logical Business Intelligence environment. The inherent risks of this architecture were discussed as well as the changed requirements for IT organizations that need to pro-actively work on new reference architectures in order not to give up their data governance.

The conference was outstandingly well organized by the SNP team. It is a fixed spot in next year’s calendar already.