Re: SAP BW compared to Essbase/SQLServer/Oracle as a Enterprise Data Warehouse & OLAP application

amandajonesbc_at_lycos.com (Amanda Jones) wrote in news:d42580f.0301110137.5d6bdcca_at_posting.google.com and I quote:

> My company as asked me to prepare and evaluate between alternative

Your company *HAS* asked you. *HAS*. Not *as*!!!!

> product from SAP customers. Some of the customers indicated following
> issues with SAP BW:
> -difficult to use
> -went through long implementation cycles
> -performance was poor and scalability issues
> -maintaining the application was expensive since SAP BW and ABAP
> consultants are needed for ongoing maintenance.

That goes for just about ALL software sold by SAP. Without exception.

The last item is probably the most important. Not only do they charge you an arm and a leg, but they lock you in to a way of doing things that requires either very expensive specialized consultants or complete business re-engineering.

One of the highest costs associated with SAP as well is: if you go down the road of customization, EVERY SINGLE TIME you upgrade their software version you'll be up for an enormously costly re-development/re-testing of ALL your custom design/code.

Or else you can do what most do: re-engineer the business to fit the SAP "model". Then you're even more locked-in, but that doesn't seem to worry the idiots buying this sort of thing: after all, when the proverbial hits the fan they'll be long gone and not held responsible for this madness.

> Next configuring SAP BW needed specialist SAP BW consultants and we
> found out good SAP BW consultants were hard to get and getting
> consulting help from SAP would cost us - $2000/day. Apart from this

Says lots for the TCO of their solutions, eh?

>
> So in all staffing requirements we found for SAP BW to implement a
> enterprise data warehouse was we need :
> 1) ABAP resources to program ETL process
> 2) SAP BW resources to configure SAP BW (develop cubes) and reports
> 3) Ascential resources to develop non-SAP ETL processes
> 4) Crystal resources to develop Crystal reports
> 5) SAP BW technical resource with skills in Oracle DBA and SAP Basis
> skills
> 6) UNIX system Admin resources

and then you need to hire the third party consultants to come and do the business process re-engineering for you. That usually involves lots of "visioning".
Mostly visioning the size of your budget...

> data. The consulting project was in itself appears to be a million
> dollar project and more.

Yup. Very much in character.

> the BW cubes.Apart from this these aggregates have indexes as well. We
> looked at some of the SQL generated by SAP BW reporting solution which
> is nothing but a Visual Basic for Application (VBA) addin to Microsoft
> Excel the SQL queries for even simple tasks where long SQL selects
> with so many joins.

Yup. Again, in character. Of course, if all that causes horrendous performance problems, the fault is ALWAYS with some other supplier. NEVER, never with SAP.

> SAP BW supports only ROLAP and the ROLAP engine is the same SAP Basis
> application server SAP always had on R/3 and the ROLAP is implemented
> in SQL and ABAP programs.

And you'd be surprised what Basis and ABAP are really based on and how they operate internally. I'll give you a hint: about 40 years old technology, all Cobol-based, all flat-file based.

> need to take data in SAP BW to another data mart or data warehouse we
> need to pay license to SAP for extracting our own data in SAP BW ??

Lovely, isn't it?

>
> The feedback from customers using SAP BW and some independent analysts
> like the ones above does not give us a comfort level to me to
> recommend whether SAP BW will be a ideal data warehouse for our
> company. The least I want is to lead the company into something of a
> quicksand.
>

You got that right.

> Oracle/SQL Server with Hyperion Essbase/Cognos. Some of the SAP BW
> consultants claim SAP BW is better than Business Objects, Cognos or
> Hyperion.

What do you expect a mafia like that to say?

> Can you please throw some light and compare SAP BW to
> 9iOLAP/MicrsoftOLAP2000/Essbase/BO/Cognos & Acta/Informatica and if
> any of you are using any of these alternative solutions can you please
> provide your experiences with these alternatives to SAP BW like Acta
> with Essbase/Oracle/Cognos or SQL Server and if there are any resource
> on the net which outline how to evaluate a data warehouse.

You just did the best comparison I've seen in a long time. I couldn't have put it better myself. IMO, SAP is one of the biggest ripoffs this industry has ever seen.

-- 
Cheers
Nuno Souto
nsouto_at_optusnet.com.au.nospam