Given the sheer amount of data many organizations are storing in their data warehouses, the point where it’s no longer practical to store all that data on premise is rapidly approaching.
Looking to help companies running SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse (BW) software to make that transition, WFT Cloud, a unit of Wharfedale Technologies, has launched a service where IT organizations can move to a version of SAP NetWeaver BW that runs on an instance of the SAP HANA in-memory computing platform managed by WFT Cloud. That service, which can be leveraged in a private cloud managed by WFT Cloud or in a private cloud running on premise that is managed by WFT Cloud, includes an upgrade to version 7.3 of NetWeaver at no additional charge.
That service comes at a time when SAP is encouraging customers to move to a HANA platform that in many cases will eliminate the need for a data warehouse altogether. But according to Rajeev Menon, senior vice president of the SAP practice for WFT Cloud, while SAP HANA will eventually eliminate the need for a separate data warehouse, it will take many years for most organizations to be able to take advantage of HANA’s ability to meld transaction and analytics workloads on a single platform. In the meantime, many customers will be looking to migrate their existing data warehouses onto a HANA platform that is orders of magnitude faster without having to invest in acquiring the infrastructure to run a data warehouse that is gradually heading toward obsolescence.
As part of a concerted effort to expand its base of customers, SAP has been pushing the adoption of HANA as a cloud service. Those services are going to be delivered via both SAP and third-party providers of IT services that are building out private cloud services of their own using SAP HANA.
The degree to which customers ultimately decide to deploy SAP software on clouds fed by SAP or a third-party IT services firm remains to be seen. What is for certain is that massive amounts of SAP software is about to make the transition to the cloud. The challenge is going to be figuring out exactly how to get it there.