If your organization uses SAP, you probably know that the company has ended support for embedded Business Objects (Xcelsius) dashboards, since they rely on the ancient and vulnerable Adobe Flash framework.
While SAP wants you to move your dashboards to HANA, that gets expensive: you need to keep up SAP BW licenses for all instances and maintain associated hardware, specialized ABAP developers are expensive and hard to find, and HANA's high compute costs have surprised many organizations. BW's inflexible legacy platform is already a barrier between data producers and increasingly sophisticated and demanding data consumers.
Meanwhile, since the rest of your organization is already moving to the cloud, the effort to migrate the data to HANA is even harder to justify.
But the biggest issue you'll face is the complexity and risks of an SAP migration. Navigating and understanding legacy data pipelines is complex work. Rationalizing which pipeline components need to be "lifted-and-shifted" is manual and time consuming. It can be hard to confidently estimate how much time the work will really take:
- BEx queries. How many BEx queries are in scope?
- BW cubes. How many cubes are consumed by the BEx queries?
- Data stores. How many data stores are in a cube, and what are their hierarchies?
- ABAP routines. What Start, End, Full and Field-level ABAP routines are there for each transformation?
- Documentation. How long will it take to document Current and Future Data Flow Architectures, and create Source-to-Target mappings?
Axis Migrates SAP BW to Snowflake—Automatically
With advanced automation techniques, Axis can significantly reduce the time and effort to scope and deliver a migration from SAP to Snowflake—or any modern cloud platform—increasing reliability and delivering quickly.
Our automated framework takes the guesswork out of the migration:
- Scoping. The Axis automation framework crawls through the SAP BW tree structure, comprehensively recording all the elements so nothing is missed.
- Output. The framework autogenerates all the required output—cubes, data stores and transformations.
- Delivery. With predictable results, you can accelerate project planning, and provide a "small target" for developers.
With our automated migration framework, Axis considerably reduces the time spent manually investigating SAP BW pipeline objects and processes, reduces the risk of error and gets you into your modern platform quickly.