Business Information Warehouse for SAP (Prima Techs SAP Book Series)

SAP BW is based on common industry-accepted standards that enable third-party vendors to integrate their products with SAP BW. Since 1998, several third-party vendors have certified their products to load data to and access it from SAP BW. Data loading tools use Staging BAPI, and data access tools use ODBO. At present, the products listed in Tables 3-1 and 3-2 have been certified by SAP BW 1.2B as part of the SAP Complementary Software Program. These vendors are in the process of BW 2.0 certification for their products.

Most data warehouse and business intelligence vendors provide a collection of tools that support a specific function needed to construct a data warehouse such as data extraction, data transformation, and end-user data access tools. Often, tools provided by vendors, even from one vendor, do not support a common development environment or user interface. This situation makes it difficult for organizations to build dedicated teams for specific tasks of a data warehouse construction process.

Though the number of vendors providing data warehousing solutions and tools is increasing, the following section compares only a few tools available at the time of this writing that interface with SAP R/3 and SAP BW.

Figure 3-1 shows a list of a few data warehouse tool providers and their limited functionality when compared to SAP BW. SAP BW functions are represented as bullets one through eight. The vendor tools addressing similar (but not exactly the same as SAP BW) functions are shown along with the product vendor. The following section provides my hands-on working experience with and research on a few SAP ODBO and Staging BAPI-certified products from November 1999 through January 2000. The information provided here should not be considered a recommendation of one or another product; rather, this should be considered simply an academic discussion, because the data warehouse capabilities in some of the products discussed may have changed.

Figure 3-1: SAP BW and Third-Party Vendors' Data Warehouse Products.

• ActaWorks for SAP from Acta Technology is a data extraction, transformation, and data-loading product. Though ActaWorks provides some initial SAP R/3 data extraction schemes and generates ABAP code to populate data marts, you must develop change identification and delta change capture techniques for transaction data in SAP R/3. ActaWorks is a good product, but from an overall global information delivery perspective, it is not an information delivery environment. To fill this gap, Acta is partnering with Cognos and other vendors to provide a frontend environment to complete its data warehouse solution.

• inSight from arcplan is among the first few ODBO-certified products for SAP BW. inSight is a very mature product. You can access EIS data from SAP R/3 and SAP BW queries. arcplan has gone one step further when it comes to delivering SAP R/3 and SAP BW data analysis and reporting environments to the Internet by providing ActiveX controls for pure Web clients. arcplan has introduced another product, DynaSite, for pure Java-based clients. Note that arcplan products provide an end-user reporting and OLAP environment, and they assume that an appropriate data warehouse is already made available for reporting and analysis.

• Products from Business Objects and Cognos have been in the reporting and midrange OLAP business for a long time. Due to a large existing customer base, both vendors are working very hard to deliver powerful SAP BW frontends for end-user data access and analysis. In comparison to SAP BW, both vendors provide a sophisticated frontend (more than with Microsoft Excel). However, they do not provide tools to extract data from SAP R/3 or other sources to construct and manage an enterprise data warehouse. Cognos bundles ActaWorks from Acta Technology as a solution to extract data from SAP R/3 if a customer decides to extract data from SAP R/3. Recently, Business Objects acquired OLAP@WORKS, a powerful ODBO-compliant product that makes Business Objects a powerful OLAP environment to pull data from SAP BW as well as other OLAP engines, such as Microsoft OLAP Services.

• Evolutionary Technology Inc. (ETI) is best known for its data extraction technologies. Its products are powerful and can extract data from just about any data source, including SAP R/3. Its products are also certified to load data in SAP BW using Staging BAPI. In comparison to SAP BW, ETI covers only data functionality in BW.

• Genio from Hummingbird is another powerful product to load data in SAP BW. Genio, among the first few Staging BAPI-certified products for SAP BW, was the Leonard's Logic flagship product that Hummingbird acquired in March 1999 to complete its hub for an enterprise data warehouse framework. Data quality and metadata management, real-time enterprise application interconnects, and now data mining are Genio's strengths. Like ActaWorks, Genio MetaLink for SAP can extract data from SAP R/3 using IDOCs or directly from SAP R/3 OLTP application level APIs using RFCs and load data in SAP BW. Today Genio Suite 4.0 provides powerful enterprise data warehouse construction tools; their solution does not provide predefined business content, as do solutions from Acta and Informatica.

• Information Builders, Inc. (IBI) is one of the pioneers in enterprise reporting and data warehousing. IBI provides several tools that cover similar functionality as SAP BW. However, such tools still use old technologies and are not integrated. They do, however, provide a robust Enterprise Data Access (EDA) server that supports distributed queries across homogeneous and heterogeneous data sources and platforms. Though SAP BEX Analyzer supports only a Microsoft Windows platform, IBI supports clients on multiple platforms, including Microsoft Windows. IBI has a large customer base and will remain visible in the data warehousing industry.

• Informatica has been a leading data mart construction tool provider for more than a decade. Informatica products can extract data from flat files and relational databases to process and load data in target data marts. Informatica was late to enter the ERP data extraction race. Recently, Informatica has filled the ERP data extraction gap by adding new data extraction components for SAP R/3 and PeopleSoft. Informatica's PowerCenter was among the first wave of products certified for Staging BAPI to load data in SAP BW. When compared with SAP BW, Informatica's products are limited to the data extraction and data load capabilities of SAP BW.

• Oracle is in direct competition with SAP BW in the data warehouse market. Oracle provides many tools to build data warehouses and deliver information. Oracle has a good potential to provide a unified data warehouse environment but still lacks product integration when compared with SAP BW. Oracle also provides Oracle Tool Kit for SAP R/3. But the metadata repositories used by the SAP R/3 extractor, Oracle development tools such as Oracle Designer/Developer 2000 and Oracle Data Mart Designer, do not share the same metadata. All have their own metedata repositories. On the OLAP side, Oracle Express has its own development and management environment. This makes it very hard to build a unified data warehouse environment using common tools and technologies. Oracle provides very powerful products, but it lacks in the integrated environment to construct, manage, and deliver information of SAP BW.

• SAS Institute is best known for analyzing very large data sets. SAS provides several integrated products to build a data warehouse. The Enterprise Miner is a very visual environment to construct the data mining environment against large data sets. SAS provides SAP R/3 data extraction tools to perform data transformations and loads in the SAS data warehouse similar to SAP BW. However, SAS supercedes SAP BW when it comes to data mining and analyzing large data sets.

• Seagate is a midrange data warehouse construction and information delivery tool provider. Seagate is acquiring technologies from several vendors and offers an integrated data warehouse solution. Seagate Holos OLAP is the OLAP engine. The Reporting tools come from Crystal that can access data from most relational databases. Seagate also announced that it will build data extraction tools for SAP R/3. The Crystal Info product version 7 is certified to access data from SAP BW using ODBO. None of the Seagate products load data in SAP BW.

Just as any other IT industry segment, the data warehouse industry is going through a rapid change. Every day, new tools and vendors emerge. A few acquire data warehouse technologies from other vendors to build a strong solution-integrated tools offering. I have discussed only a few vendors; several provide data warehouse construction functions ranging from low-end to high-end. Such data warehouse vendors are listed in Appendix A, "Data Warehouse Industry References and SAP BW Training."

Tools integration, however, is just one piece of the puzzle when it comes to building a data warehouse. The business content is another. The real value of SAP BW is not in the integrated set of data warehouse construction tools but in the business content that makes SAP BW a far superior solution than any offered by other data warehouse vendors.