SAP SE is rolling out a major update to its Hana in-memory data warehouse that moves processing closer to data and gives customers an on-ramp to the cloud.

The new offering – which will be available next week – can run both on-premise and also in the Amazon Web Services Inc. and SAP Hana Enterprise clouds. SAP outlined a general roadmap for offering additional built-in integrations in the future, along with deployment on on other cloud platforms.

SAP BW/4Hana is similar to SAP’s existing Business Warehouse but is intended to run on Hana alone. SAP made the decision to jettison support for multiple back-end databases in order to remove limitations on BW/4Hana’s evolution, said Ken Tsai, vice president and head of cloud platform & data management product marketing at SAP. “We needed to provide better ability to model more flexibly than ever before, be sure we were cloud-ready and accommodate new data sources that we can’t with current technology,” he said. “We came to the realization that to deliver these capabilities we need to have the warehouse completely in-memory optimized.”

The support for multiple cloud providers addresses an important impediment to data warehouse adoption. “Many customers have not moved to a warehouse yet because they want it to be stand-up easy,” Tsai said. “Cloud option can help them get up and running.” Customers can pilot projects in the cloud and then move them on-premise as size and complexity grows, he said.

BW/4Hana is described as a “new foundation for logical data warehousing that provides the interactivity with historical and live data.” One of its key features is the ability to analyze data where it resides, a feature that is becoming increasingly critical as data volumes grow and organizations seek to reduce the amount of duplication and latency, particularly in an Internet of Things environment.

BW/4Hana is capable of working on data lakes, IoT data, sensor data and streaming data. It also integrate with Vora, an in-memory analytics engine that SAP launched in March. Vora is “the compute engine for taking different data sources and collecting it into data warehousing environment,” Tsai said, noting that data lakes are now a popular way for organizations to experiment with different data sources to identify candidates for the data warehouse.

SAP said it has improved the user interface, laid a foundation for rapid application development and will now support “multi-temperature” data handling. That’s a technique that classifies data by access frequency as either hot, warm or cold. Depending on the classification and usage, data is stored in different memory areas for more efficient access.

It all adds up to simpler development, Tsai said. while SAP did not announce any significant enhancements to its development tools, the combination of more sophisticated data lifecycle management, tiered storage support, a fully Web-based interface, a model-driven framework, simplified data migration data object optimization adds up to a rocket engine for developers. A new release of Vora scheduled for late this month will improve distributed query processing across Hana and data lakes, he said.

The new release also supports enhanced data flow modeling and a unified and streamlined warehouse object model. Business applications built on the platform can take advantage of SAP’s pre-built data warehouse or a more standard SQL-based development environment. The platform automatically generates views in SAP Hana that combine SQL data logic and application data taken directly from SAP S/4Hana.

“The digitization of business requires a modern approach to data management, data processing and analytics that can handle any data source and type in real time,” said Bernd Leukert, member of the executive board, products & innovation at SAP.

But it’s the cloud integration that will probably intrigue customers most. Through a partnership with Amazon, BW/4Hana will offer built-in deployment for Amazon Web Services as well as the SAP Hana Enterprise Cloud, with additional cloud deployment options planned for future releases. The platform can also integrate with SAP’s BusinessObjects Cloud, adding enhanced exploration and data visualization capabilities into the mix.

SAP has issued a new certification for AWS’s memory-optimized X1 instances that provide for scale-out deployments of up to seven nodes and 14 terabytes of memory, making AWS a legitimate platform for data warehousing.

“Offering more memory than any other SAP-certified cloud instance available today, AWS’s X1 instances are purpose built for customers who want to quickly try, deploy, run and optimize their critical workloads in SAP Hana at scale, without investing in on-premise infrastructure,” said Peter DeSantis, vice president of compute services at AWS.

SAP’s roadmap declared that customers can expect future enhancements to simplify data management through a reduction in objects and layers, additional cloud or hybrid deployment options, a more modern user interface that incorporates data flow modeling and performance boosts through unified data load management.

SAP’s decision to integrate BW with Hana is an intriguing one, given that not long ago SAP was compelled to deny rumors that it would replace the former product with Hana.

Image courtesy SAP

Additional reporting by Paul Gillin