SAP launched SAP BW/4HANA, a new data warehousing product, in September 2016. SAP BW/4HANA is not, as you might initially think, the legal successor to the tried-and-tested Netweaver-based SAP BW, but is offered as a completely new, separate product. It therefore joins "SAP BW on AnyDB" and "SAP BW powered by SAP HANA" in SAP's existing data warehouse product range.
While the differences between a currently patched SAP BW powered by SAP HANA (in particular SAP BW, edition for SAP HANA) and BW/4HANA SP0 may still be minor at the moment, SAP has made it clear that major developments and innovations can only be expected with SAP BW/4HANA.
BW/4HANA should therefore be regarded as a strategic product, as there will in all likelihood not be an SAP BW 8.0 based on Netweaver (end of mainstream maintenance for SAP NETWEAVER 7.5: 31.12.2022 [2]).
To achieve this, BW/4HANA is no longer based on the SAP Netweaver platform, but on its own lean ABAP application server. This allowed the removal of a great deal of legacy code (ABAP legacy code). In addition, the decoupling from the SAP Netweaver release cycle ensures that innovation and developments can be published more flexibly and quickly.
The streamlining is most clearly visible in the number of object types used to build the data warehouse.
From originally 10 different object types in classic BW, the entire data warehouse in SAP BW/4HANA is built from just 4 object types.
Thanks to the versatility and strength of these objects, significantly leaner data models with an even greater range of functions are possible. This should also make maintenance and troubleshooting in the data models easier.
Modeling, administration and monitoring in SAP BW/4HANA takes place largely in the integrated BW modeling tools of SAP HANA Studio (Eclipse) or via the browser. Transaction RSA1, the Data Warehousing Workbench, is no longer available in SAP BW/4HANA.
With the new development of SAP BW/4 HANA, SAP is also renewing the front-end clients for the evaluation and visualization of the data provided in SAP BW/4 HANA. These are in particular
In addition to the tried-and-tested Analysis for Office and Design Studio tools, SAP is providing self-service tools with Lumira 2.0. The SAP Digital Boardroom gives managers access to real-time contextual information, ad-hoc reporting and what-if analyses to make better decisions and implement changes directly.
SAP BW/4HANA also offers open interfaces for third-party BI tools based on SQL, MDX and ODATA.
The connection of possible source systems has been greatly simplified. Of the original 10 different source system types, only 3 now remain in BW/4HANA. The Operational Data Provisioning Framework (ODP) will replace the SAP source system in classic BW. All source system extractors of the ODP framework are supported.
Links to sources and further information:
http://news.sap.com/germany/sap-bw4hana-14-fragen/
https://apps.support.sap.com/sap/support/pam
https://www.sap.com/documents/2016/09/b001a9de-8a7c-0010-82c7-eda71af511fa.html
https://tfxz.wordpress.com/2016/11/17/technical-summary-of-bw4hana/
https://blogs.sap.com/2016/11/02/bw4hana-in-a-nutshell/