Teradata launches analytics product as SAP BW replacement

Teradata has released an analytics product for SAP ERP, as a full-blown alternative to SAP BW. 

The data warehouse supplier said the product will provide easier and cheaper analysis of SAP ERP data than does SAP BW (Business Information Warehouse).  

The supplier cited, in a statement, an online retail customer which was having difficulty running the business because it was unable to get timely reports based on enterprise resource planning (ERP) data: "With the adoption of Teradata Analytics for SAP, managers at the retailer were able to quickly measure and predict the impact of changes, such as introducing free product delivery for a select group of consumers.”

Teradata business development director Kevin Long (pictured) said the new product’s capability came with the acquisition of New Frontiers in mid-2013, which brought with it existing SAP ERP customers. These include Dutch electronics retail company BCC, Dutch train maintenance company NedTrain, and frozen potato products producer Lamb Weston.

“We bought the intellectual property of its data extractors from the SAP modules,” he said. “We have been integrating SAP data with Teradata for seven years or so, and co-habiting with BW so that a lot of the intensive analytics work can be done in Teradata. 

"We have a concept of infocubes, so that cubes can be held in Teradata or partially held there, and that has enabled SAP users to offload the challenges with BW. But some of our customers get frustrated by the complexity of it.

“This offers a way to do away with BW altogether. It extracts data from SAP ECC [ERP Central Component] from a comprehensive array of modules, and it comes with the ELT scripts, the data model, and 150 dashboards and standardised business reports. It offers a way of getting data directly from SAP without having to rely on the logic built into BW,” said Long.

Teradata’s targets for the software are SAP customers which struggle with BW and are hesitating over the investment required for the SAP in-memory database, Hana, said Long.

Teradata describes Hana as an “expensive and immature appliance”. 

"We have seen very few, or indeed any, customers who have migrated BW to Hana. There are organisations which have adopted Hana for operational reporting. But the scale of data that BW instances typically have means that we’ve not seen Hana migration," said Long

“And we would say the Teradata intelligent memory offering is more cost effective. This is significant for us. It provides a viable alternative to BW,” he said.