SAP BW Modernization & Data Renewal
Part 2 of the SAP blog series: What decisions you need to make now from an architecture and data perspective
The end of maintenance as a structural turning point
Mainstream maintenance for SAP BW 7.5 will end in 2027. In many SAP landscapes, this date marks not a technical event, but a structural turning point. And this comes at a time when data and analytics architecture is already under pressure: Many BW systems have grown historically and are closely integrated with SAP Business Suite. At the same time, numerous companies are undergoing or planning to migrate to S/4HANA, while the demands on analytics, planning, and data-driven decisions are continuously increasing. Our experience shows that the BW system itself is usually not the problem. Rather, the underlying architecture for data, semantics, and analytics is reaching its limits. The end of maintenance makes this fact visible and forces decisions that have long been postponed. In our blog post, we therefore take a closer look at the various options for action.
BW vs. Business Data Cloud: Same idea, new architectural reality
For many years, SAP BW was the backbone for reporting, analytics, and, in some cases, planning in SAP landscapes. The basic idea was to provide a harmonized data layer, map business logic centrally, and enable evaluations and planning based on this. This end-to-end understanding was one of the success models of BW.
With the Business Data Cloud, SAP is revisiting this fundamental idea, albeit under completely different technical and architectural conditions:
- The architecture is cloud-oriented, more modularized, and service-based.
- Data storage, semantics, logic, and usage are decoupled and brought together via data product concepts.
- Instead of proprietary structures, open and interoperable formats such as Parquet and open table formats (e.g., Apache Iceberg) are coming to the fore. This means that data can now also be stored and processed across platforms.
This openness facilitates integration with non-SAP technologies, increases flexibility in data architecture design, and supports modern analytics and AI workloads across system boundaries. Important for you: BDC is not a "new BW," but a paradigm shift. Those who consciously shape this shift can efficiently redesign responsibility, governance, and architecture—instead of just migrating existing structures.
The actual decision: Three clear architectural paths
With the end of maintenance for SAP BW, companies are not faced with a technical detail question, but rather a fundamental architectural decision. In practice, three consistent architecture paths can be distinguished: SAP-centric, non-SAP-centric, and hybrid.
The three architecture paths at a glance:
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Each architectural path has different implications for controllability, dependencies, and future viability. It is therefore crucial to choose these options consciously and not to let them arise implicitly through individual decisions.
Lift, Shift, Innovate – Classification from a project perspective
For the transition from BW to the Business Data Cloud, SAP recommends a three-step approach consisting of lift, shift, and innovate.
- Lift: Technical 1:1 transfer of existing BW content for rapid stabilization without technical changes.
- Shift: Gradual migration of existing BW components to proprietary data products. A special data product generator is planned to support this step starting in 2026 .
- Innovate: Targeted redesign of models for data product architectures, real-time analytics, integrated planning, or AI applications.
In practice, this approach can be useful for saving time and managing risks. However, it is important to note that a pure lift merely prolongs the existing situation. Only in the shift and innovate phases does the opportunity arise to question existing logic and redefine strategically relevant scenarios. Without a clear target vision, there is a risk of simply continuing with old architectures in new technology – instead of modernizing the data landscape.
Avoiding stumbling blocks
Similar patterns can be observed in many BW modernization projects. Often, attempts are made to adopt existing logic with as few changes as possible, decisions are predominantly tool-driven, and ERP, data, and analytics teams frequently work with different objectives. This leads to friction, inconsistent solutions with new dependencies, and greater complexity in the long term.
Blog post author
Julian Schütt has been advising our customers for over 15 years, from the conception to the implementation of smart data architectures. As head of the Data & Cloud Services business unit, he is involved in the use of innovative technologies, from agile cloud environments to the efficient use of artificial intelligence.
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