In this follow-up to our discussion on the business case for Business Data Cloud, expert Shawn Brown returns for a focused deep dive into one of the most critical topics for established SAP customers. If your organization has a significant investment in SAP Business Warehouse (BW) or Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC), this episode is essential listening. Shawn provides a strategic roadmap for migration, explaining how BDC offers a "glide slope" to modernize your landscape by turning existing artifacts into valuable data...
In this follow-up to our discussion on the business case for Business Data Cloud, expert Shawn Brown returns for a focused deep dive into one of the most critical topics for established SAP customers. If your organization has a significant investment in SAP Business Warehouse (BW) or Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC), this episode is essential listening. Shawn provides a strategic roadmap for migration, explaining how BDC offers a "glide slope" to modernize your landscape by turning existing artifacts into valuable data products, rather than forcing a disruptive break from your past investments. Tune in to understand the clear path forward for your on-premise solutions and learn how to leverage BDC to protect what you've built while accelerating your future in data and analytics.
With over two decades of experience in SAP solutions, Shawn Brown currently serves as Senior Director for SAP’s Center of Excellence. Known for expertly identifying customer needs, Mr. Brown excels in presenting tailored solutions involving Business Technology Platform, Business Data Cloud, S4HANA, and Business AI. A proven leader in demand generation and partner relationship management, Mr. Brown has successfully driven initiatives that enhance customer experience and streamline cloud solution adoption. Renowned as a thought leader and strategist, Mr. Brown frequently shares insights with CIOs and business influencers, fostering strong, trust-based relationships across multiple industries.
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Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Mustansir Saifuddin: Welcome to Tech Driven Business, brought to you by Innovative Solution Partners. I'm honored to have Sean Brown of SAP rejoin me to a deeper dive into what SAP Business Data Cloud means for existing business warehouse customers. If you're running BW or BPC and weighing your options, this episode is for you.
[00:00:28] Welcome
[00:00:32] back to Tech-Driven Business. Shawn, how are you?
[00:00:36] Shawn Brown: I am doing well. Thanks for having me back. Happy to be here.
[00:00:40] Mustansir Saifuddin: It's great to have you back. I'm really excited to have you back on our show, especially when we started the first session. It was more summary level talking about business data cloud in general. What I would like to do is to bring it a notch down and talk about some of the benefits.
[00:00:58] that BDC will bring to SAP BW customers. I see a lot of questions or thoughts about what it will do for those customers having business warehouse. So I'd like to dig deeper into this conversation. How does that sound?
[00:01:14] Shawn Brown: That sounds great.
[00:01:16] Mustansir Saifuddin: Awesome. Awesome.
[00:01:17] Okay, so let's get into it. Right? Let's start with this. I mean, how does BDC simplify the data landscape for BW users? Let's start with that.
[00:01:29] Shawn Brown: Yeah, so I think the big question is first, how is a customer using BW? This gets into whether they're using it for the purposes of. An analytical tool. They've built reports against, they've BEx reports. They, they're using older technologies like Business Objects. They're moving forward to actually even using even some third party, or they're using SAC or are they using it for the purposes of extracting the data from the source systems at SAP ERP, ECC
[00:02:04] And even if they're already on S/4 and then using it as, Hey, I've extracted this data from SAP, now I'm looking for a way to use this data. And if it's acting as a bit more of a pass through then they have to kind of figure out what are they gonna do to get to that data after they're
[00:02:24] thinking of what are they gonna do with BW now, if they're thinking about BW in a BW 4HANA perspective, they're probably looking at it as a long-term solution because they've got until 2040 before they have to really get off of BW. If, if they're using it in, let's say BW 7.5, they've got a little bit more time.
[00:02:44] But the question is, are you gonna upgrade or, you know, what's the longer term plan with it? In those cases, I think really the big question for those customers is if I am looking to try to move to the more advanced capabilities that we have to access data within SAP. Then you're, you're clearly going to be in a position of trying to explore Business Data Cloud.
[00:03:08] Now, the ability to take your environment that is on-prem, likely today in BW and then move it into BDC it, it moves in as a private cloud instance within BDC. This allows you to basically turn off everything that you're doing. On the on-prem BW and turn it into a software as a service that I think is going to open up a lot of opportunity for organizations that, you know, they may have invested very heavily in BW. If they're on BW4, they're looking at some maintenance costs. If they're before that, they're not so worried about it, but they are still dealing with potentially HANA costs. To be able to take all of that investment that they may have made and move it into BDC changes in many respects, the, the [00:04:00] path to do this 'cause
[00:04:02] now it's not I have to pay for something in perpetuity or maintain something in perpetuity. I have a path to make it easier to move those assets into BDC. This is where the data product generator in BW in BDC is a big game changer because data products are gonna be the way that we're going to be delivering SAP artifacts in in the future.
[00:04:27] To be able to take those BW artifacts and turn them into data products, and then develop all of your own insights on those artifacts, on those new BW data products that you've generated. This is gonna create a, a really great opportunity for a lot of those organizations that have been trying to figure out what their path forward looks like.
[00:04:51] Maybe one last thing I'll say on this is, for those organizations that are maybe thinking of decommissioning BW altogether and moving towards some third party capability, I guess my only caution would be that's gonna be an expensive proposition, both in the short term and in the long term.
[00:05:09] Most organizations are looking for self-service analytics. And while you can spend a lot of time and energy curating all of that data from all of the systems across your organization at SAP with SAP data, we're already doing that for you. You're basically duplicating the effort that we're going to provide out of the box.
[00:05:32] This is one way you can kind of say, what do I do with BW? Well, I wanna move away from it, but if I wanna move away from it, I have a way to do it and still be able to take advantage of a lot of those curated data products that will be delivered from SAP, from all of those, we'll call it ERP based needs.
[00:05:49] .
[00:05:49] Mustansir Saifuddin: That's a good point you made. Let's circle back on this last point you mentioned later in our conversation. One thing that I, I take away from this is depending on your BW version you have options available to you. And eventually the idea is how to reuse some of these investments you've done over the past few years that customers have been using BW, BW4HANA, and not lose all that investment.
[00:06:17] Shawn Brown: Mm-hmm.
[00:06:18] Mustansir Saifuddin: Going to the private cloud and having those BW artifacts turn into the data products we know we talked about in BDC, and make sure that you are still able to utilize that. That's a big win for customers.
[00:06:32] Shawn Brown: Absolutely.
[00:06:33] Mustansir Saifuddin: Let's talk about customers who are running a little bit more complex BW. You know, when you have BW and you also have BPC, either it's used for planning or forecasting or consolidation. What are some of the considerations when it comes to their future planning and consolidation platform? Can you delve into that and kind of show the path, like what it's gonna look like?
[00:06:58] Shawn Brown: Yeah, so, so most BPC customers already kind of know that there is the consolidation piece is the big question mark in many regards, and it really depends on how much they are leveraging, consolidations, how complex they are. The planning piece is something that we, we look at from a standpoint of, yes.
[00:07:19] Okay. We're, we're really looking for SAC planning to take over those responsibilities. But then the consolidation piece is something that is going to find its way into S/4HANA. When we're talking about this combined environment, BW and BPC, what I see mostly with customers is that BW is has a larger role than just BPC, but it can just be BPC.
[00:07:45] The benefit of BDC of Business Data Cloud is that we're now able to go ahead and take those BPC environments into Business Data Cloud and turn them into a private cloud setting. This gives [00:08:00] a little bit more time. This is something that SAP's really trying to work pretty hard on this year, is taking customers that are a BPC customer, move them into BDC as part of a private cloud deployment.
[00:08:14] And then that allows time to transition to SAC planning and then take advantage of S4 for those consolidations. Now there's a lot of organizations, you know, partners that have been working on this as well to try to figure out how do I deal with some of those consolidations in SAC planning.
[00:08:34] And in some cases that works really, again, gets back to how complex your consolidations are. That's something that has to be considered as organizations try to figure out what am I gonna do with my BPC environment? How am I going to modernize it? If it's working fine, this is one that I always try to focus on with customers is, I'm not interested in trying to fix something that isn't broken.
[00:08:55] If it's working fine for you and feel like you can have some more time to actually make a transition take advantage of some of those new tool sets and learn what those new tool sets have to offer that the previous tool sets did not have to offer. That's the other part, right? Things may be working fine, but it also means that you may not be taking advantage of new technology, new capabilities that are going to improve your planning and consolidation efforts.
[00:09:22] Mustansir Saifuddin: I think that's an interesting comment you made about how going to private cloud eases the burden from a customer perspective. If you're a BPC shop and you are running BW you don't have to wrap everything up and start over. It's almost like there's a path for you and you can still utilize older technology or the existing technology, and then look at ways of modernizing.
[00:09:47] Either choose the planning solution or look at other consolidation solutions like group reporting, as you mentioned in S4.
[00:09:55] Shawn Brown: Right, right.
[00:09:56] Mustansir Saifuddin: it seems like there's time that they can buy. Can be utilized for, for adapting to the new tool as well as learning what else you can offer besides what I'm currently doing in BPC.
[00:10:11] Shawn Brown: Right.
[00:10:11] Mustansir Saifuddin: Though it's not broken. There are ways to analyze and then make the decision. I think that's a big win. I see that as a good consideration from SAP perspective. There are always folks who are thinking, there will be challenges any time you look at a new solution. What is your advice, like, what are some of the key considerations potential challenges that BW customers should be aware of when they're planning a move to Business Data Cloud? Something that comes to your mind that you can share as a caution or something that they should be thinking of or taking care of.
[00:10:47] Shawn Brown: Yeah, the first thing, it sounds obvious, but your BW is going to be in the cloud, right? So one thing that you might think about is the type of maintenance that you've had to do to take care of that environment, to have the personnel that will oversee that environment .That changes quite a bit with the support of SAP when it's in a private cloud environment.
[00:11:10] That's one of the things out of the gate you can look at and you say, all right, there's some benefits that I'm getting, as a result of moving into private cloud. I'm gonna have SAP overlooking this environment with me. This is the other thing to consider too, is that private cloud is from an SAP perspective, private cloud is a stepping stone. It is to get you to a public cloud environment where really you don't have to do much of anything to maintain your environment, at least not from an infrastructure or from a upgrades. We're doing all of that for you and we're taking away the risk factor of those elements where your organization has to care for that.
[00:11:52] Moving it to private cloud is saying, all right, now SAP takes on some of those responsibilities. And then longer term you're [00:12:00] seeing that Business Data Cloud is a software as a service. So we're going to be taking away even more of those administrative type of responsibilities.
[00:12:10] Those keep the lights on type of responsibilities that a lot of organizations have had to bear in the past. And then the last part is we're going to help you get to the point where you can take advantage of new advancements in technology faster. Because frankly, once you kind of move into the space of a public cloud scenario, as you've transitioned from private into public over time, then essentially you're having the advantage of using those new advancements as we release them
[00:12:44] rather than this staggered effect. Now that's gonna require some understanding that the way we did things in the past and the amount of customizations that we might have done and the amount of wrangling of data that we did in the past, those things we may not need to do as much of in the future.
[00:13:01] And we have a framework upon which it'll make it easier for you to, let's say, add data elements to the standard SAP data elements that you have or make customizations that are a combination of data elements, that'll be a lot easier to manage over time because the foundational components, the building blocks upon which you will use are already there from SAP's point of view.
[00:13:29] So as we introduce new enhancements, new improvements to those building blocks, those customers get to take advantage of them immediately.
[00:13:40] Mustansir Saifuddin: So, we always look for success stories or examples. Can you share any examples success stories of companies that have either started the migration from BW into Business Data Cloud or, already done through the migration and, and some of the benefits that they have realized or come across?
[00:13:58] Shawn Brown: Yeah, I.
[00:13:59] Mustansir Saifuddin: That'll be great to hear your thoughts.
[00:14:00] Shawn Brown: I would say that the customers that I've talked to, and I'd love to be able to use names, but they're particular about that at this point, but the customers that I've spoken to that we have had some success with already are doing exactly what we're talking about.
[00:14:13] They're taking their BW environment, they're moving it directly into Business Data Cloud. It's a PC environment, and. They're already on this journey of taking those artifacts and saying, how do I make use of them in Business Data Cloud? How do I turn those BW artifacts into data products that can sit at the foundation layer of BDC?
[00:14:34] And then how do I then start building the models within Datasphere to make them available for any sort of reports that they want to go ahead and leverage at that point. A lot of this is taking advantage of the type of visualizations that they may have already built, let's say, for example, with SAC and using them as part of the Business Data Cloud construct.
[00:14:58] So we're early days on some of this, so customers are very early on on this, but the goal or the vision based on some of the engagements we've had so far is playing out exactly as we've talked about today and in the past as well. So that's, that's why I can give you on that.
[00:15:15] Mustansir Saifuddin: That's helpful. When we talk about BW customers, let's focus from that perspective: you are using the Business Data Cloud's major offering, which is, Hey, how can I have a data product?
[00:15:27] Right? The data product approach is what's going to help them reuse those investments in a newer environment, in a way that they can further grow instead of being stagnant with the, the old technology. So that's where I see the value.
[00:15:44] Shawn Brown: I'm gonna add something to that one too, Mustansir, because, you know, the the thing that we think about as these investments that we have in BW they're investments that organizations don't want to let go of initially. But over time, [00:16:00] we should see that ultimately these investments, these developments that they've done with BW, for example, and what they've extracted from the ERP, whether it's ECC or S4, what they've extracted is essentially they're a collection of data products that over time SAP is going to provide
[00:16:24] out of the box anyway, so there's gonna be time that you're going to say, all right, I've developed these data products from these Business Warehouse artifacts. But as SAP continues to release new data products for all of our business applications, they're largely going to replace much of what the BW artifacts are, which of what the BW data products are.
[00:16:51] I like to think about this for customers as this is your transition. This is the easy glide slope to move from i'm flying along with BW and all of what invested I've done, but I've gotta land somewhere and I've gotta find a way to easily transition into the newest, latest and greatest capabilities that SAP re releases as part of Business Data Cloud.
[00:17:17] Those will be those new data products that will feed those insight apps. We're largely going to be taking a lot of those investments that customers have made over time and said, you can replace them over time. And the beauty of that as well is you don't have to worry about maintaining them as well.
[00:17:37] SAP maintains them and, and of course. We can include any sort of custom fields that you've added all of those elements into those data products so they're not static, but they are something that largely the bulk of the work is something that SAP is going to cover for you over the extended period of time.
[00:18:00] Mustansir Saifuddin: Absolutely. I think the idea is. Once they get into BDC once they get into private cloud, they can immediately start utilizing the AI capabilities and some of the newer needs of the organization, which was earlier not possible with BW.
[00:18:16] Shawn Brown: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
[00:18:18] Mustansir Saifuddin: Let's talk about other options, other cloud data warehouses.
[00:18:24] We kind of touched upon it earlier , SAP customers who have already started a journey with some of the other data warehouses, like Snowflake, Azure , in some cases GCP, those other platforms what benefits will they get by adopting BDC? Can you shed some light on that?
[00:18:44] Because they're already on a journey, right? Like you mentioned earlier, I just wanted to bring it back to that conversation because important for those customers to realize what will be there for them if they want to look at BDC as the potential option?
[00:18:59] Shawn Brown: Yeah. Let's use a couple of scenarios here in this case, right? Scenario number one. I'm on ECC and I'm moving to S/4HANA. I already have invested a lot in terms of how I access SAP data and then delivered it to a third party repository, we'll call it. Right? Operational data store, data warehouse data lake.
[00:19:21] Let's whatever terminology you want to use to, to describe what's happened with acquiring SAP data and then delivering it to some third party, and it could be directly, let's say because the customer had access at the database level, they purchased HANA Enterprise and gave them access to the database level to get to it.
[00:19:43] As they move to the cloud, much of that's gonna change. Much of that's gonna go away. Not only is it going to go away just because you're probably going to go from ECC to S4 because that's gonna change too, because the data structure has changed, but also from on-premise to [00:20:00] cloud. So this is the type of scenario that organizations should try to avoid in the future.
[00:20:09] How much work do I have to do to get the data from a source system to deliver it to some other need in the organization? That's scenario number one, what's changing as a result of every upgrade, every change to the environment that takes place, whether it's a version change or whether it's on-prem to cloud.
[00:20:29] All of those things or whether it's one other additional one, which we've talked quite a bit about here, which is what if BW is involved? What if I'm using BW as the extraction point to get to the SAP data, even if I am and I'm making a change, let's say from ECC to S4, BW is gonna change.
[00:20:47] Much of that has to be reevaluated. So when you think about how I'm acquiring SAP data, the best way to look at it is if I can get the data curated for my needs out of the box, and I don't have to do anything to make that happen, or I have to do a minimal amount of effort because I'm just making the adjustments for
[00:21:10] the custom fields I might have, the customizations I may have included. Those are things that we can include as most of the work has been done. SAP has provided most of the curated data. Now, then this gets into a question of what question am I asking and where am I getting the bulk of the data from? And I think we might have touched on the data of gravity topic in the last discussion, but I think it bears
[00:21:38] that, we're talking about for just another second more, which is, if I'm asking primarily an SAP question, and I know that the time it takes to deliver SAP data is, is critical, right? 'cause it's, it's tends to be, in many cases the most important data in an organization. Finance data usually is where we can start.
[00:22:00] Then we have to ask how important is it to be able to deliver that data as quickly as possible, especially for an SAP data centric question, right? Why take all of the extraction points, put it over into a third party, model it, do everything we have to do with that, and then make it available to the SAP community when SAP is going to be providing
[00:22:27] access to that data in a curated format, knowing already what kind of questions the business community's going to ask of that data. Why not just make it available for them to access it through Business Data Cloud? Now, that sounds like a really centric SAP data strategy. We understand that the converse of that is that it's not always going to be the case that, you know, the bulk of the data that's being asked for is SAP.
[00:22:51] It could be third party data as well. So. That's where you also ask the question, well, what's the fastest way for me to access the SAP data to deliver it to a not so SAP centric question. You need data elements from SAP, but the question primarily is third party data, and we're just using SAP data to enrich that third party data.
[00:23:16] The bulk of the data being in, let's say, whatever third party it is, or an operational data store or a hyperscaler, wherever they've taken that data and placed it, whether they extracted it or they have a tool set, similar to what SAP provides with Business Data Cloud. We're providing the data in a curated format through our data products anyway, this is the best way to access the data from SAP systems.
[00:23:42] 'cause again, we know what questions organizations are going to ask, we know what data elements they're going to ask of, and we've already built all the logic into that data package, data product that we can deliver to any third party need. So [00:24:00] this is a scenario where I like to use some people kind of chuckle at first, which is I call this the SAP's data strategy as a snuggle, don't struggle. We're happy to snuggle up to whatever else you're doing in your organization. We're not here to struggle and say you need to do everything through SAP. You don't. What we want you to do is be able to access SAP data in the most efficient manner possible, in most inexpensive manner possible, and to be able to deal with changes to the environment that come with upgrades,
[00:24:33] with new advancements in the technology that are bound to happen because we're living in a, a pace of super hyper change, especially with AI. We're, we're in a position to deliver that data for whatever need it is, whether it's an SAP centric or a non SAP centric. But using business data cloud is the fastest way to get to the data.
[00:24:56] Already curated, already ready to go for whatever need is. The business may have.
[00:25:02] Mustansir Saifuddin: Yeah, I think the bottom line is the speed that you get and the speed is what's going to count in the future. So it seems like the, the BDC answer will be: how do you make that access to the data as quickly as possible in order to get that, you know, get benefit out of that information.
[00:25:20] Shawn Brown: For sure, time is. Time is money.
[00:25:23] Mustansir Saifuddin: Time is money.
[00:25:23] Exactly. So I think that leads me to my last question. What's one key takeaway from this session that you want to leave with our listeners?
[00:25:33] Shawn Brown: Yeah. I would say, I'm gonna lean in on something I said earlier, you know, which is SAP's the best at delivering SAP data. Nobody understands the data and the needs of the data better than we do. And the reason for that is because we have 50 years of talking to organizations in different lines of business, in different industries and knowing what it is that they're looking to do with our data structures, right?
[00:26:05] It's their data. But the structure upon that data is something that SAP has created, and largely we've evolved what those backend data models look like. We've evolved what the different fields are that we capture because we understand what organizations are trying to do with the data that they're collecting and placing in the SAP systems.
[00:26:30] So knowing that, know that when the business comes to the data and analytics teams in the organization and they say, we need a report that says this, they're likely going to leave something out. They're likely not going to include everything that is being asked for, and the data and analytics organization's gonna do their best to deliver what the business is asked for.
[00:26:55] Not knowing oftentimes that they're missing things, that relationships that they need to take into account are something that requires real understanding of the backend business application for SAP. What we can do with Business Data Cloud is simplify the world for the data and analytics teams, the IT department.
[00:27:22] It's a lot of effort, a lot of work that they have had to do in the past that SAP is taking on for them and then just delivering what it is that the business is going to ask for. Even if the business doesn't know yet that they need another data element, it's already there from SAP from our data products.
[00:27:42] It comes back to the same thing that we've said before, which is time is money. The faster we can deliver these data products to our customers, and the customer says, well, the business says this: this has everything that I want except this, except this is just a click, one [00:28:00] click, and you turn it on.
[00:28:01] You add one more data element rather than, okay, now I need to go ahead and take a look at where I'm getting the data from, whether I'm actually at the database level or whether I'm actually, you know, do using some best practices and using those core data services that SAP provides. Instead of having to know all of the backend relationships and the things that you might have to pull, on top of what was requested by the business, the data's already curated.
[00:28:27] It's already there for you. Now, that's the part that customers have gotta take away from, which is we're delivering speed. Speed gives you that opportunity to consume the data as quickly as possible. And then the, the one other thing I'll say and know you asked for one, but at the, this one goes directly with it, which is you're gonna have visualizations that you're going to need to develop.
[00:28:53] Those visualizations are things that we already knew that customers have been asking for over and over and over. We've had a rich history of building business content for our customers, and now it's just a matter of now putting it into a visualization that is software as a service, push a button and it's available.
[00:29:14] Start consuming it. It's about speed. Delivering those data products curated quickly and then about delivering, delivering those visualizations. So I think, I think that's, that's really the, the, in a nutshell the big, big elements that customers need to understand about the benefits of Business Data Cloud.
[00:29:33] Mustansir Saifuddin: That is great. Thanks. What I'm hearing from you is it's all about how quickly you can make it happen. What are the, the different pieces that you can leverage if you are a BW customer and then not losing those investments at the same time, be able to get up and run much quicker than if you are taking a different path either adopting party solution versus, you know, keep using your current environment but not able to utilize some of the changes that are coming up in the Business Data Cloud. And I think it's just a way of speeding up your journey for AI.
[00:30:12] Shawn Brown: Absolutely.
[00:30:12] Mustansir Saifuddin: Thank you for the time you spent with us. It's been a pleasure and it's been very informative, so thank you.
[00:30:18] Shawn Brown: Great. Thanks, Mustansir. I appreciate the time as well.
[00:30:22] Mustansir Saifuddin: Thanks for listening to Tech Driven Business, brought to you by Innovative Solution Partners. Sean shared valuable roadmaps for SAP BW and BPC customers to BDC. Sean's key takeaway with 50 years of experience. SAP understands its own data structures better than anyone. It's about leveraging their expertise to gain speed.
[00:30:51] Use BD, C to dramatically accelerate your journey from data to insight and ai. We would love to hear from you. Continue the conversation by connecting with me on LinkedIn or X. Learn more about innovative solution partners and schedule a free consultation by visiting i solution partners.com. Never miss a podcast by subscribing to our YouTube channel.
[00:31:16] Information is in the show notes.
