An interruption in the SAP reporting services could create a ripple-effect that would impact operations. The customer relied on the availability of the BusinessObjects platform to help with critical day-to-day operations. However, the new analytic opportunities presented by the HANA project had also raised several technical questions in the customer’s mind, and the stakes were high. The goal of HANA was not only to enable faster reporting, but to provide the opportunity to mine enormous volumes of retail and operational data to identify hidden linkages that could provide clues about how to make the business more competitive. Another expectation was that new kinds of statistical analysis could be performed on shopping baskets, to understand the relationships between product SKUs that sold well together or at specific retail outlets.

By using HANA instead of Oracle to power BW, the customer expected to realize enormous gains in reporting throughput and performance. The business justification for moving to HANA was compelling. Do we need to change anything? What BusinessObjects reports might break after the migration?” “We need to understand the implications for our Web Intelligence and Crystal reports. “We are now in the process of moving that BW system from Oracle to HANA,” he continued. “We have over 3,800 BusinessObjects Enterprise XI 3.1 public reports based on SAP BW 7.3,” their BI team lead informed me, “And another 20,000 personnel reports on top of that.” It started with an innocent-seeming question from a large customer with at least 5,000 BusinessObjects users.

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