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SAP Business Warehouse vs SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

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 (14th)
SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) (12th)
 

Mindshare comparison

SAP Business Warehouse and SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. SAP Business Warehouse is designed for Cloud Data Warehouse and holds a mindshare of 1.2%, up 1.2% compared to last year.
SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, on the other hand, focuses on Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS), holds 1.7% mindshare, down 2.0% since last year.
Cloud Data Warehouse
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
 

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.
Suresh Tanneeru - PeerSpot reviewer
High stability, reasonably priced, and important for digital transformations
Customers need to be better educated about using the solution's cloud for digital transformation. SAP as a legacy system is missing that flavor. The solution is not a traditional ERP software so should be used as a digital transformation tool. That is the story to project to customers, partners, and sales teams. This will help the solution grow faster than GCP, AWS, or Azure. In fact, Google Cloud Platform is now collaborating with SAP for digital transformation. The solution should offer affordable modules that are customized to startups with 50 to 500 employees. Most people think of SAP as being only for big enterprises but it could be very useful for smaller companies. There are 40,000 to 50,000 startups in APAC each year and that is a large volume. Many of the solution's modules could be used by those startups. Google is targeting this market with chat boards and automation tools at a reasonable price or with six months of free usage. SAP should come up with this kind of module and include sandbox so providers can play with a few of the POCs.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The real-time information is great."
"Predominantly, our company uses SAP Business Warehouse for reporting purposes across various departments, especially for managers to gain a quick understanding of their current standing and make informed decisions."
"The most useful feature has been he ability to feed data into multiple systems in various formats."
"The most useful feature is definitely the speed."
"The most valuable aspect of the solution is the integration with SAP ERP."
"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 SAP Business Warehouse is transformation, where I extract data from different sources, particularly the raw data. Then I do some transformations and store that in a format that allows me to do reporting easily."
"Out-of-the-box reports are very useful."
"One of the features that I've found most useful is that It's very simple. They take care of the technical aspects of the data, installations, patches."
"The BTP module is important for digital transformations."
"The real-time data processing and the ability to track all leasing processes and contracts are particularly valuable."
"It is a scalable solution if you have a good cloud infrastructure."
"Traditionally, SAP worked with Oracle databases, but SAP is getting rid of the other databases and promoting its own. SAP will stop support for other databases around 2026, so everyone is moving to SAP S/4HANA for the performance and because it's the preferred database for SAP. S/4HANA has new features from the front-end or application feature perspective. The idea is to move toward future-ready technology."
"It has significantly streamlined our operations."
"Ensuring data integrity across finance, supply chain, and other critical areas is paramount for real-time decision-making. Access to accurate and up-to-date information is essential for data protection. While the digital solution primarily serves basic maintenance, the ability to handle these core aspects efficiently is invaluable for your needs."
"I am impressed with how the solution integrates with the ME system and ALE IDocs."
 

Cons

"The advanced structuring can be complicated and the interface is not very intuitive."
"The solution could offer better connectivity with other databases."
"The solution should be more open to the cloud."
"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."
"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."
"A few things which are missing include the visualization of reports. That's where your costs and licensing become heavy. When it comes to this database compared Microsoft Warehouse, it's an expensive solution."
"In the next release, my suggestion would be to have user-friendly interfaces and performance issues be addressed."
"The product must provide more details of the errors."
"The SAP products are complicated to deploy anywhere."
"SAP support isn't on par with products like Microsoft Azure or AWS. It's nowhere close to the competitors."
"Our data centers are in Europe and come under GDPR regulations, and this doesn't apply to the Middle East yet. It causes a lot of confusion."
"The only thing that could be improved is the cost."
"Customization is an area of concern in SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, where improvements are required."
"The customer has a lot of dependencies on SAP which means they don't have much flexibility to go and update the system when or if they need to. They will need to wait for the quarterly updates. It's possible to maybe raise a special request with SAP if it is absolutely necessary."
"The stability needs to be improved to be able to handle large amounts of data."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I would not recommend it to small-scale companies. The price is too much."
"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."
"It's moderately expensive, but definitely has its branding and price value for it."
"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."
"Overall, the pricing is not fixed and is expensive."
"The solution is quite expensive."
"It's very, very expensive."
"I rate the product's price a five out of ten."
"The solution could be less expensive."
"The solution's cost is reasonable."
"The price is on little bit higher. For SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, we see roughly five crores per annum."
"The product itself is relatively expensive."
"The pricing is reasonable when compared to other vendors like Oracle who offer technology enterprise resource software."
"The price is expensive compared to the competition."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Government
10%
Energy/Utilities Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
17%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Retailer
7%
 

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 HANA Enterprise Cloud?
It has significantly streamlined our operations.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud?
SAP HANA Cloud can be quite costly compared to other solutions. The high licensing costs make it an expensive option, particularly for smaller customers. However, they offer solutions for mid-sized...
What needs improvement with SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud?
SAP should adopt more rapid changes in market processes and customer needs to deliver solutions that meet new industry requirements swiftly. SAP finance needs to be more advanced to keep up with cu...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Medtronic, Cirque du Soleil, Antarc, B&G Manufacturing, EarlySense, eBay, Ferrero, James Austin Company, Lenovo, Sagem, RAK Ceramics, Vodafone
FC Bayern Munich, Reuters News Agency, MEMEBOX
Find out what your peers are saying about Snowflake Computing, Microsoft, Google and others in Cloud Data Warehouse. Updated: April 2025.
847,862 professionals have used our research since 2012.