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SAP BW4HANA vs SAP Business Warehouse comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

SAP Business Warehouse
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Warehouse (13th)
SAP BW4HANA
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
42
Ranking in other categories
Data Warehouse (9th)
 

Featured Reviews

JavedKhan1 - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers powerful analytics and integration capabilities but requires improved upgrade processes
SAP Business Warehouse could have been better. There is room for improvement from a technical perspective. So, from a technical perspective, when we are upgrading a Business Warehouse server or we are migrating from one place to another, the capability required for this upgradation has many manual activities. It took us around a month to streamline our server. Let’s say there are some transaction codes. Transaction code is a set of programs, and when you want to run a program from the backend, you need to hit the transaction code. It is called a T-code. So during the upgrade, many transaction codes get affected, and as a security consultant, it is my responsibility to recheck those transaction codes which are affected. Sometimes more than 100 codes may get affected, sometimes 500, and sometimes more as well. So, it takes a hell lot of time to integrate them again. That is a limitation or defect within the SAP Business Warehouse. SAP Business Warehouse should come up with proper solutions. Upgradation is an automatic activity. It should happen by itself. We just need to initiate it, and the backend SAP server is automatically upgraded. But it should handle the transactional code as well. They should not get absolutely, and any authorization object should not get deleted from the transaction codes. So, that functionality SAP Business Warehouse should come up with.
DilipRoshantha - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers good value for money to users
There have been no hiccups for my company when it comes to integrating SAP products with the data analytics and the transactional systems since my company uses SAP PI for it, but lately my organization has been using SAP Process Orchestration for data integration. With SAP, there is a small visualization part inside SAP BW4HANA. I can visualize some of the reports with the help of SAP BW4HANA. The tool can be configured and is compatible with all SAP applications, which makes it a good product. I believe that the product has the capabilities to cater to various business requirements. The product does offer value for money. There are big customers along with medium or small customers. Small and medium-sized customers cannot afford the cost of the tool's licensing. From a value point of view, in business terms, it is good. I rate the tool a nine out of ten.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The most valuable aspect of the solution is the integration with SAP ERP."
"In terms of stability, comparatively, the solution is quite stable."
"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."
"We are currently in a basic stage of analytics and the first goal we have is to make sure the numbers are correct. BW has some features that help you to build factors and ETL in such a way that it's easy to get to correct responses. That's the number one condition that you have to have in an analytic solution."
"Having the back-end data set with the right information is the best qualification for this solution."
"Having the integration with the reporting tool which is provided by SAP is great."
"What I like most about SAP Business Warehouse is its ability to feed data into new, multiple systems in various formats. It can open its data to any system over gateway services or a portal or application that needs to consume and analyze data."
"Out-of-the-box reports are very useful."
"Technology-wise, it is a very robust tool."
"The solution is based on SAP ERP, so there's some business content already included. For customers who use SAP ERP, SAP BW4HANA is a good choice for their DW implementation."
"The most valuable feature is the dashboard."
"The solution saves time and cost."
"I like the tool's robustness and security."
"The product has efficient performance."
"The most valuable feature is that it's robust."
"The processes are the most valuable aspect of this solution."
 

Cons

"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."
"I would like to see a different end solution in order to read the data and attract internal users."
"They should reduce the product’s installation package size for easier downloading."
"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."
"I'm not sure if our issue is related to BW or the Analysis Office. However, we're having performance issues in terms of time. It takes a long time to generate the report."
"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."
"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."
"More integration with Microsoft Office products (not just Excel) would be helpful."
"The UI is not user-friendly."
"It takes too long to escalate problems from the first level of support."
"We cannot integrate with third-party tools like Python or advanced integration options. You can't fine-tune tables within BW or generate specific views or reports."
"BW/4HANA could improve query optimization. For example, there could be an error message that pops up when you hover over it if any query fails. That would make it easier to find out what went gone wrong. Guided SAP help tools would make it easier for us to go forward."
"Support could be more reliable."
"There's one area where the other vendors have an upper edge, which is the data lake. I think SAP is trying to figure out whether to stick with IQ, their own data lake solution, or push customers toward customer-preferred vendors, like Azure Data Lake, AWS, or any other provider."
"I don't see SAP actively supporting the solution now...a better support from SAP would be appreciated."
"Challenges arise with real-time client requirements when clients are accustomed to Microsoft Excel's extensive features for data analysis. They expect similar flexibility and customization in the solution, particularly regarding headers displaying keys and descriptions or just keys. Achieving this level of customization can be challenging, and it's an area that may need improvement."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"Overall, the pricing is not fixed and is expensive."
"SAP Business Warehouse licensing is a bit expensive compared to other products in the market."
"The solution is quite expensive."
"It's moderately expensive, but definitely has its branding and price value for it."
"I would not recommend it to small-scale companies. The price is too much."
"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."
"The license for SAP Business Warehouse is paid yearly, and there's no extra cost in addition to the standard licensing fees."
"Price wise, this solution is on the higher side."
"The cost and licensing depends on how the customer is going to use the solution."
"The solution is expensive."
"For the on-premises version of the product, the solution offers a perpetual-based licensing model to its users. In general, SAP offers a monthly subscription-based licensing model to its users."
"The price is high and currently only affordable for large organizations."
"As an investment, the solution is very expensive."
"We started as early birds from the SAP side. We got this entire suite for free. I cannot really talk about the price because we didn't have to pay anything."
"The SAP HANA application still hasn't been leveraged to the fullest extent, but it's a five-year enterprise license."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
18%
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Energy/Utilities Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SAP Business Warehouse?
The solution is quite expensive. We paid a yearly subscription fee.
What needs improvement with SAP Business Warehouse?
Over a period, we realized that the license and maintenance costs were quite expensive. Every day, we had to run the background job ODS. Eventually, we moved away from SAP Business Warehouse and bo...
What do you like most about SAP BW4HANA?
One significant advantage of SAP BW/4HANA is the direct integration with the SAP HANA database, providing seamless access to real-time analytics. Additionally, it enables real-time data integrati...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SAP BW4HANA?
We have a broad licensing arrangement, which is expensive but worth it for sizeable businesses.
What needs improvement with SAP BW4HANA?
The interface could be more user-friendly, as we often need to do low-level coding to get things done.
 

Also Known As

No data available
SAP BW/4HANA
 

Learn More

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Medtronic, Cirque du Soleil, Antarc, B&G Manufacturing, EarlySense, eBay, Ferrero, James Austin Company, Lenovo, Sagem, RAK Ceramics, Vodafone
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Find out what your peers are saying about SAP BW4HANA vs. SAP Business Warehouse and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.
816,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.