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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
6.3
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Warehouse (13th)
SAP BW4HANA
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
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

"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."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the advanced structuring of data capabilities. You can get different structures of data to suit your needs."
"SAP Business Warehouse is a scalable solution."
"Having the integration with the reporting tool which is provided by SAP is great."
"With the technical support, the response has been pretty good from the SAP side."
"The most valuable feature of SAP Business Warehouse is its hybrid functionality, allowing users to leverage both SQL-based data warehouse capabilities from HANA and feature-based data warehousing from BW."
"The warehouse is the solution's most valuable feature."
"The features that I have found most valuable are its capabilities to connect to Excel and to slice and dice."
"It is a stable solution...The initial setup was easy."
"The solution is useful for connecting with external systems."
"It is a stable solution...It is a scalable solution."
"You can do hierarchical alert slicing and dicing out-of-box, which is not available in other solutions. I haven't come across that in Oracle or any other software provider."
"The most valuable aspect of this solution is that the infrastructure is easy to understand."
"We can get good visualization and less redundant data."
"I like that it's quite quick."
"I like how it blends no-code and ABAP code for complex transformations during data loading."
 

Cons

"The solution could offer better connectivity with other databases."
"In the next release, my suggestion would be to have user-friendly interfaces and performance issues be addressed."
"They should reduce the product’s installation package size for easier downloading."
"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'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."
"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 get all the information quickly, but it is one day old."
"What I'd like to improve in SAP Business Warehouse is its data structure, that's a little bit rigid. It could be a bit more flexible, so you can design your data structure and improve performance when creating a solution. Currently, the way data is stored in SAP Business Warehouse is rigid."
"Real-time processing isn't BW/4HANA's strongest point."
"Support could be more reliable."
"The speed of operations could be a little faster."
"The UI is not user-friendly."
"It's complicated to use. You need to spend a lot of time learning about it. The interface could be improved. It's not intuitive to build a data model and use their ETL tools."
"The monitoring for the remodeling feature is very difficult to understand."
"From a technical perspective, it could be even more related to legacy systems. The connectivity requirement is quite high and requires systems that are up-to-date."
"The solution is not easy to implement. It requires a lot of learning at the beginning."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"The license for SAP Business Warehouse is paid yearly, and there's no extra cost in addition to the standard licensing fees."
"SAP Business Warehouse licensing is a bit expensive compared to other products in the market."
"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 solution is quite expensive."
"Overall, the pricing is not fixed and is expensive."
"The cost of ownership is higher. It's resource-intensive, and naturally, that increases costs."
"As an investment, the solution is very expensive."
"The price is high and currently only affordable for large organizations."
"This is an expensive solution and there are costs in addition to the standard licensing fees."
"The SAP HANA application still hasn't been leveraged to the fullest extent, but it's a five-year enterprise license."
"The tool is affordable."
"In general, it's quite expensive."
"SAP BW/4HANA is expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
18%
Computer Software Company
10%
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: December 2024.
824,067 professionals have used our research since 2012.