Hi Tilak
Your thoughts are great for discussion, please, allow me to add some comments as well
- I do see your point. I believe, based on my experience, that the answer is a mixture of reasons and not a single one - as it is usually the case for real life scenarios J
BW adoption on non-SAP shops has never been really easy. Some of its more effective advantages: native integration in SAP solutions, native ETL, datasources, BI Content, etc. are usually not a BIG plus when it comes to non-SAP ERP, CRM or whatever source you are extracting data from. With SAP HANA, SAP is better prepared than ever before to position an agnostic data mart which can be built from the scratch or via accelerators. That is a major competitive advantage when you are directly comparing SAP BI solutions with MS-SQL + Analysis Server, only to name ONE example.
Then YES, maybe there is a gap between SAP’s vision and roadmap and SAP’s customers. No fault of SAP evangelists – not entirely at least – but simply because we have a complete new scenario, more complex and much (much) more options than when most of us have started with SAP BW. I have started back in 2001 (BW 2.1C) and back then, life was easy from a consulting point of view:
- When customers used to ask for a Data Warehouse, we would suggest: SAP NetWeaver BW
- When customers used to ask for a reporting solution, we would suggest: SAP NetWeaver BW (based on Query Designer)
- When customers used to ask for a Dashboar solution, we would suggest: SAP NetWeaver BW (based on Web Application Designer)
- When customers used to ask for a predictive solution, we would suggest: SAP NetWeaver BW (based on APD);
- Well, you got my point J
I believe it is a matter of time, SAP evangelists, SAP specialists, SAP consultants and SAP customers will grab the full potential of available tools and will certainly been able to design solutions that will meet old and new business requirements and, more important, been able to address needs which are even not known today!
I’d suggest a pic in a great article to a discussion on HANA EDW: http://www.saphana.com/community/blogs/blog/2013/04/03/the-hana-edw#fig2