Hi everyone,
At the moment I am doing my thesis. The assignment is to research future tooling for SAP data migration (especially the load process), so simply said 'What are replacements for LSMW'. I also have to research the future of the SAP data migration market.
There is a lot of information which makes it impossible to read and understand everything within 5 months for someone who is new to SAP. I started this research in the beginning of February and this is what I understand of SAP data migration since then:
SAP data migration is a process which moves data from a legacy system to a SAP system performed by an ETL process. You can load the data into SAP or you can do it directly into the database tables, which is a bigger risk. There is tooling available for both options.
I began my internship at the same time as the launch of SAP S/4 HANA. So I understand that S/4 is founded by dr. Hasso Plattner because of the evolution of SaaS. There are less tables and no redundancy, which makes S/4 smaller and faster. S/4 can be on-premise or in the cloud and it uses a Fiori interface. I've also heard that S/4 is the same as Simple Finance, is this true?
The following link tells me that there is nothing changing in the data migration process for SAP HANA compared to ECC. But does this apply for SAP S/4 HANA too? https://blogs.saphana.com/2013/01/15/lets-talk-sap-hana-database-server-migration/
I also found out that S/4 has dataprovisioning, if i get it right it means that the data is migrated real time?
SAP mobility is also a new thing. The normal data migration is still the same, but the migration to a mobile device is different I suppose? The data is not migrated into the mobile but it uses the data from a database. For the mobile device to use this data it needs a new kind of data migration I will call it 'streaming' for now, because I don't know how it is called. To give an example of what I mean: Take Itunes and Spotify, Itunes will put the music directly on your mobile device, which is the traditional way of data migration. Spotify will not migrate the music into your mobile device, it is just 'streaming' the music to your mobile device. But Spotify needs to stream the right music to your mobile device and I suppose that this is a new kind of data migration.Can someone tell me if I am right or not? And if someone understands what I mean, can you please describe it in a better way?
Then there is 'the cloud' which I think should have an impact on the migration process, but I cannot find out what this change is. I was thinking, the database where you put your data into is not dedicated, so there must be changing something here.
I also saw things like SAN and NAS based tools, which I don't understand and would like to know if these tools can work with SAP. And for other tools I would like to know: 'How can I see if a tool can work with SAP, when they don't name that specifically?' And how can I see if a tool is migrating the data to SAP or directly to the database tables?
Can someone tell me if my view of SAP data migration is right and describe me how the SAP data migration market looks like and also what it is going to look like in the future?
Thanks in advance
Chris Cladder - The Netherlands
