Monday, Novemger 30, 2020
Unify & Optimize Your SAP BusinessObjects & SAP Analytics Cloud Environments
Achieving better time to value in your Hybrid BI & Analytics deployments requires a strategic approach. While the environments are radically different, the resources they use are generally the same or similar, and even when they are not you can still leverage the time and work that has gone into your SAP BI system to build Analytics content rapidly and efficiently.
A strategic approach to your hybrid strategy lets you learn from and leverage your SAP BusinessObjects system to build an effective SAP Analytics Cloud system.
Here we highlight a number of aspects of a strategic approach and the considerations you should examine to make the journey into SAP Analytics Cloud both timely and rewarding while saving you significant time and resources.
Understand & Leverage Your SAP BusinessObjects System
Your SAP BusinessObjects content and usage holds key information to help you build effective content in SAP Analytics Cloud quickly and efficiently, managing resources, and rationalizing license requirements. APOS Insight gives you the knowledge you need for effective management of your SAP BusinessObjects environment, and it can help you inventory content and determine which content is most in demand by your information consumers.
APOS Insight helps you understand what’s going on in your SAP BusinessObjects environment: what’s being used, what’s not being used, who’s active, who’s not, what kinds of questions are being dealt with in your system. If you’re looking to build a story in SAC with similarities to a report in SAP BusinessObjects, Insight will give you the structural analysis to understand the detailed makeup of the report, including formulas and calculations by which the questions were answered in SAP BusinessObjects, and simplify and speed the path to story creation.
Automate Right-Sizing of Your SAP BusinessObjects Environment
The roles of your BI & Analytics deployments will change over time. If you are looking at reducing your SAP BusinessObjects footprint and increasing SAP Analytics Cloud deployment, you will also want to right-size your SAP BusinessObjects environment. In order to right-size your SAP BusinessObjects environment, you need to know system utilization details, and Insight will be a big help in this pursuit. APOS Insight will help you understand system and content usage patterns, cyclical patterns, and what content is being used to fulfill the information requirements of your organization.
Using information gained through APOS Insight, you can use APOS Storage Center to right-size your BI environment automatically, archiving unused content and users to reduce technical debt and resource and licensing requirements, while safeguarding content for audit readiness and future analytics use. Rather than delete a large part of your SAP BusinessObjects content, you should back up and/or archive that content. With the appropriate configuration, Storage Center will work with Insight to archive content automatically when it has not been used for a specified period of time, automating right-sizing.
APOS Insight provides knowledge of SAP BusinessObjects, and how content is structure therein, and Storage Center automates archiving of your least-used objects and instances.
Harness & Future-Proof Your Data Modelling Assets
Future-proofing your SAP Analytics Cloud deployment requires implementation of data connectivity that is independent of your SAP BusinessObjects system.
If you choose at some point to move all of your analytics to the Cloud and thereby reduce your on-premise footprint, then it makes little sense to retain on-premise data connectivity dependence. If many calls from your SAP Analytics Cloud system are to a BusinessObjects Universe, then you require a BusinessObjects system to process the request. That is, you are creating a system dependency which your SAC deployment may outgrow.
If the Cloud system is dependent on an on-premise system to start with, then it is in danger of remaining so, which negates the point of moving to the Cloud. If the sole purpose of your SAP BusinessObjects system becomes a means to provide data connectivity for SAP Analytics Cloud, then perhaps creating that dependence is not a good strategy to start with. Implementing a new or different strategy in the future may incur more cost and uncertainty than a more aggressive early strategy. You should attempt to secure the future of your SAC stories by using data connections that will continue to be supported.
The APOS Live Data Gateway’s independent semantic layer allows SAP Analytics Cloud to use existing data sources and data connections as live connections, removing the need to pass requests through your BusinessObjects system, or any other system.
Of course, if you are moving your analytics data and connections to SAP HANA, you will have no issue with data connectivity or data consumption, now or in the future. However, if SAP HANA is not in your plans, then the independent semantic layer provided by APOS Live Data Gateway will allow you to future-proof your SAP Analytics Cloud data connectivity.
Harness Your Existing Data Modelling Assets
The value of your existing SAP BusinessObjects data modelling assets is substantial, and you need to look at ways to leverage those assets for your SAP Analytics Cloud platform.
One way to leverage this value is to use the APOS UMMA to translate your SAP BusinessObjects data modelling assets into either SAP HANA data modelling or into modelling within the unified semantic layer of APOS Live Data Gateway. APOS UMMA automates the data modelling process by extracting SQL statements from your Web Intelligence reports and translating them into SAP HANA Calculation Views, which HANA uses to model data for SAP Analytics Cloud, SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, and other Analytics solutions, whether Cloud-based or on-premise.
APOS UMMA can also translate SAP BusinessObjects Universe logic into the independent, unified semantic layer of the APOS Live Data Gateway. Using these solutions to leverage your existing data modelling and create a unified semantic layer will help you to ensure your BI and analytics continue to provide an ongoing, single version of the truth.
Expand Your Data Connectivity & Data Consumption Horizons
APOS Live Data Gateway provides unified data modelling, allowing you to govern and consume data across the SAP solution landscape from an extensive array of data sources. Expand the reach of your SAP BI and SAP Analytics Cloud platforms with the virtualized data connectivity that APOS Live Data Gateway provides.
You may have longstanding legacy systems to which you require data connectivity, and it is not possible or advisable for you to move these to HANA, whether for technical or sizing issues. For example, you may have non-SAP, best of breed, data lakes, other cloud-based environments, or solutions to which you have a major financial commitment such as data appliances. These may include Snowflake, Microsoft Azure Data Lake, Teradata Data Warehouse Appliance, IBM Netezza appliance, DB2, Hadoop, or MongoDB among many others.
The virtue of using a single solution such as APOS Live Data Gateway to create and manage data connections and consume data across your Enterprise solutions is that you are not dependent on one solution within that Enterprise stack to deliver connectivity now, or in the future. You can connect to data where it is, and when you need it. Whatever the future brings, you are ready for it.
APOS Solutions for Hybrid Deployments
No two hybrid scenarios are the same, but all approaches to the future of data connectivity and data consumption within any organization should be strategic, meaning that you need to consider both time to value and the need for long-term viability and flexibility.
The APOS products mentioned in this piece will help you achieve both rapid time to value and ensure the long-term viability and flexibility of your BI and analytics data connectivity and data consumption. These products include:
- APOS Insight – Identify active users and content in your BI system
- APOS Storage Center – Automate right-sizing of your BI environment and manage content with backup, archive, selective restore & versioning
- APOS UMMA – Leverage your SAP BI data modelling in SAP HANA & SAP Analytics Cloud
- APOS Live Data Gateway – Unlock Live Data with a Unified Semantic Layer and future-proof your data connectivity and data consumption