SAP BW 7.0 - 7.4 -The end is drawing closer

If you’ve read my previous blog on SAP BW Customers – are you ready, I’ve mention that the support maintenance for BW will end in Dec 2024.

This is only applicable for customers who are on BW 7.5 version. For customers who are BW 7.3 or 7.4 the support maintenance will end in Dec 2020. (All other versions of SAP BW are not supported by SAP i.e. they’re out of support maintenance.)

Are you are one of the 12.5k SAP BW customers not on BW 7.5??

From my conversations it’s obvious to me that many of these users are recognising that the decision whether to upgrade to BW 7.5 or to migrate to BW/4HANA is certainly not a straightforward one.

There are several factors that need consideration when deciding to migrate to BW/4HANA or not:

SAP Support Maintenance – is it acceptable within your organisation to be out of a support contract for a software product (in this case SAP BW)?
Budget – as documented in my previous blogs, to migrate to BW/4HANA is a very time consuming and costly activity. Have you secured the necessary budget for the migration?
BW/4HANA desire – is there a desire within your organisation to move to BW/4HANA?
Alignment – have you and the wider decision-making stakeholders achieved full visibility of the critical path and implementation processes so that you can plot the most appropriate and responsible and engage the relevant expertise?

When you reflect and arrive at a point of clarity you’ll see that the choices distill down to upgrading to BW 7.5, move to BW/4HANA or taking no action.

If your BW system is a version other than BW 7.5 (on HANA DB) then in-place migration is not possible. The two-migration options remaining are Remote or Shell conversion. (Please note for Remote conversion your BW version must be >= 7.3 (on any DB)

To the many I interact with and who seek my advice my steer is that if your BW version is not on BW 7.5 then I’d recommend that you review the questions above ASAP to determine the roadmap for your BW system over the next few years.

I (and, I’m sure, many others in our community) would love your thoughts, opinions and insights – how are you feeling right now about, and managing the BW/4HANA migration?

Dónal Geraghty operates SeaPark Consultancy to offer bespoke SAP BW/4HANA migration support and solutions. SeaPark works with your existing on-site team & external vendors to optimise BI operating processes and ensure the highest levels of ROI.

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