ERP gets BIW - SAP AG's SAP Business Information Warehouse - Brief Article - Product Announcement

Software Magazine, Sept, 1997

With data warehouse dollars up for grabs, SAP is one of several ERP vendors moving in to capture market share. Following the disappointing performance of its Open Information Warehouse, SAP revamped the product's architecture and recently previewed Business Information Warehouse, its next-generation data warehouse solution.

The BIW comes pre-configured with business process knowledge to provide users with a view of R/3 and non-SAP data company-wide.

Moves from Baan and PeopleSoft are not as ambitious, says Barry Wilderman, a vice president at the Meta Group. "[SAP's] defining an approach that has value for ERP vendors building data warehouse products. The whole idea that you can have access to the business intelligence in an ERP system is valuable," he says.

With its introduction of the BIW, Wilderman says SAP has addressed an issue facing many businesses using SAP and other enterprise packages -- where to do overall data analysis. "Life gets interesting when you look at how to combine data that gets generated from the ERP package with data that gets generated outside the walls of the ERP package in order to do analysis that spans both sets of data," says Wilderman, adding that the BIW helps fill this need.