Apache Hadoop vs SAP Business Warehouse comparison

"It's open-source, so it's very cost-effective."

"Hadoop is extensible — it's elastic."

"Most valuable features are HDFS and Kafka: Ingestion of huge volumes and variety of unstructured/semi-structured data is feasible, and it helps us to quickly onboard a new Big Data analytics prospect."

"It is a reliable product."

"As compared to Hive on MapReduce, Impala on MPP returns results of SQL queries in a fairly short amount of time, and is relatively fast when reading data into other platforms like R."

"The ability to add multiple nodes without any restriction is the solution's most valuable aspect."

"​​Data ingestion: It has rapid speed, if Apache Accumulo is used."

"I recommend it for the telecom sector. I know it well, and it's a good fit."

"The warehouse is the solution's most valuable feature."

"With the technical support, the response has been pretty good from the SAP side."

"The most useful feature has been he ability to feed data into multiple systems in various formats."

"The most valuable aspect of the solution is the integration with SAP ERP."

"The solution has functionality that makes it easy for end-users to readily extract data directly from Business Warehouse into Excel and carry on their analysis on their own."

"Out-of-the-box reports are very useful."

"SAP Business Warehouse is a scalable solution."

"What I like most about SAP Business Warehouse is that it's a seamless integration platform. A valuable feature in the tool is the monitoring alert that makes you aware of what process chain has failed. There's no manual monitoring required if you have configured an alert system, so the process chain can run in the background, and you can get alerts about it. The functionalities I find good in SAP Business Warehouse are alerting and monitoring. If you have configured the tool and have integrated it with SAP Solution Manager, then it's a good product to use."

"Hadoop's security could be better."

"From the Apache perspective or the open-source community, they need to add more capabilities to make life easier from a configuration and deployment perspective."

"It could be more user-friendly."

"In certain cases, the configurations for dealing with data skewness do not make any sense."

"We would like to have more dynamics in merging this machine data with other internal data to make more meaning out of it."

"The key shortcoming is its inability to handle queries when there is insufficient memory. This limitation can be bypassed by processing the data in chunks."

"The problem with Apache Hadoop arose when the guys that originally set it up left the firm, and the group that later owned it didn't have enough technical resources to properly maintain it."

"I would like to see more direct integration of visualization applications."

"We are very unhappy with technical support. First of all, they send their sales agents or pre-sales agents and most of them who don't know the solution as a properly trained tech would. We have an on-site SAP representative who is supposed to help us with our high priority and production issues, and they're not satisfactory to say the least."

"There is room for improvement from a technical perspective."

"It takes more work to get the data, including reporting on that data, because some coding is required, and a significant level of transformation is needed when using SAP Business Warehouse."

"I would like to see a different end solution in order to read the data and attract internal users."

"SAP Business Warehouse could improve by having more out-of-the-box use cases to cover more business types or operations."

"One of our requirements is the ability to easily get answers regarding trends and exceptions. In BW, it is not that easy to get such information. I expect better trend and exception detection, better pattern detection."

"The way the data is stored is kind of rigid in SAP BW as a product. It could be more flexible so that when we are designing a solution, we can design our own data structures and try to improve performance."

"The problem with BW, and the factor that differentiated it from the original BW, is that you only get limited functionality with your runtime license. So, you have to pay extra for extracting data."

"We just use the free version."

"For any big enterprise the costs can be handled, and it is suitable for big enterprises because the scale of data is large. For medium and small enterprises, the tool is on the high-price side."

"The price could be better. Hortonworks no longer exists, and Cloudera killed the free version of Hadoop."

"The product is open-source, but some associated licensing fees depend on the subscription level."

"The price of Apache Hadoop could be less expensive."

"Do take into consider that data storage and compute capacity scale differently and hence purchasing a "boxed" / 'all-in-one" solution (software and hardware) might not be the best idea."

"​There are no licensing costs involved, hence money is saved on the software infrastructure​."

"We don't directly pay for it. Our clients pay for it, and they usually don't complain about the price. So, it is probably acceptable."

"The solution is quite expensive."

"Overall, the pricing is not fixed and is expensive."

"It's moderately expensive, but definitely has its branding and price value for it."

"It's quite pricey. SAP changed its pricing policy, so they give you one engine and then you have to buy everything next to it, like MSS, the BPC licenses, and everything else."

"SAP Business Warehouse licensing is a bit expensive compared to other products in the market."

"The licensing cost for SAP Business Warehouse depends on your revenue. Its licensing structure is a little bit complicated. The more your revenue is, the higher the price, but SAP does have different pricing structures for various companies. For small businesses, licensing isn't based on revenue, but for big companies, it's revenue-based. There's some agreement regarding pricing for huge companies, so it's different, and SAP Business Warehouse pricing isn't fixed. On a scale of one to ten, I'm rating the licensing cost for SAP Business Warehouse as five because it's very high. As your revenue grows, your licensing cost also increases, so you have to factor that in when calculating your cost."

"I would not recommend it to small-scale companies. The price is too much."

"The license for SAP Business Warehouse is paid yearly, and there's no extra cost in addition to the standard licensing fees."