For years, SAP Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC) customers have dutifully paid their 20–22% annual maintenance fees—expecting updates, innovation, and support. In 2025, it’s time to ask a hard question: What are you really getting in return? 

Topics: HANA, Analytics, Cloud, BPC, SAP HANA, Analytics Cloud, SaaS, SAC, BPC Lifeline

Using SAP Analytics Cloud as a Client to BPC

Posted by Steve Sussman on Mon, Jun 03, 2024 @ 00:06 AM

SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) is delivered as a SaaS (Software as a Service) solution on the SAP HANA Cloud Platform.  SAC combines multiple EPM, BI and Analytics features/benefits into one product.  This allows users to plan with robust collaboration features while using Predictive Analytics as well as Business Intelligence, and robust, state of the art Analytics. Currently, SAP BPC remains the default approach for Enterprise-wide Planning, Forecasting and Consolidations, while SAP Analytics Cloud fulfills relatively straightforward requirements from a planning and forecasting perspective.  

Topics: HANA, Analytics, Cloud, BPC, SAP HANA, Analytics Cloud, SaaS, SAC

Introduction to SAP HANA

Posted by Darko Kavazovic on Tue, Jan 13, 2015 @ 09:01 AM

As an IT professional, I was very interested in HANA when the product first came out to the market two plus years ago.  Initially getting started on HAHA involved buying all physical hardware, which put smaller companies on the sidelines due to high start-up cost.  Over time, HANA has truly transformed by getting more and more features added with the new service packs.  It was not just the features, but also the support expansion that enables you to run HANA on the various vendor’s hardware and the ability to run it on virtualized hardware such as VMWare and AWS (Amazon Web Service).  The best part from an IT perspective, is that while it used to take weeks or even months to setup HANA, now you can be up and running in matter of hours if you utilize providers such as AWS. 

I have worked with HANA on physical, virtualized, and cloud platforms, and they all offer a wide range of performance and memory levels.  HANA can currently be installed as standalone or scale-out (aka multi-server configuration).  When it comes to HANA memory size capacity, you can scale up to 6TB of the memory for a single system, and the scale-out cluster can have up to 112TB+.  When it comes to cloud offerings, they are not currently available with such a large memory capacity, but their offerings change for the better all the time.  In my opinion, the fastest way to test HANA in your own environment would be to utilize virtualized hardware that most organizations already have in place.  I know that some shops are mostly Microsoft, and since HANA runs on Linux they are hesitant about having to support a different operating system; but, to put this in perspective, more than 70% of all websites in the world run on some Unix operating system, and that is due to their flexibility and high reliability.  Having to support multiple operating systems is inevitable.  HANA was initially only offered on SUSE aka SLES (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server), and due to demand it is now also offered on Red Hat Linux.  In my opinion, unlike Windows, Linux requires a lot less maintenance. 

Topics: HANA, Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Cloud, BPC (Business Planning & Consolidation)

Topics: HANA, Thought Leadership, OutlookSoft, NetWeaver, Roadmap, Microsoft, Implementation, BPC (Business Planning & Consolidation)

3 Reasons Why EPM Unwired Will Add Value to Your Organization

Posted by Will Leonard on Fri, May 31, 2013 @ 11:05 AM

The SAP EPM Mobility suite continues to gain momentum, most recently with the addition of Planning and Consolidation (BPC) to the SAP EPM Unwired app. SAP announced a mobile version of BPC in October 2012, and demonstrated the mobile app at SAP Financials 2013 in Las Vegas. 

Topics: HANA, Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Cloud, Value, BPC (Business Planning & Consolidation)

HANA: Improving SAP One Customer At A Time

Posted by Martin Lloyd on Mon, May 13, 2013 @ 12:05 PM

If you’ve read anything which has come from SAP in the last few months you will have heard of HANA. I understood that SAP thought it was very important but didn’t really understand what it was and how it was going to affect me. After some reading, attending a couple of courses and being involved in some discussions with SAP I know a little more and would like to share it with you.

Topics: HANA, Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Consolidation, Cloud, Roadmap, Value, Data, BPC (Business Planning & Consolidation)

Service Pack 9 for Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC) 10, Netweaver version, has some notable enhancements that are worth discussing.  There are three that we are speaking of specifically:

• Support for Time Dependent Hierarchy
• Parallel execution framework is implemented
• MDX on HANA

Topics: HANA, Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), BPC (Business Planning & Consolidation)

SAP released the latest update to the Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) roadmap on March 19^th.  Although I won’t go into great detail on the roadmap or discuss every new feature, I will provide high level overview of the highlights as I see them. 

Topics: HANA, Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Innovation, Roadmap, Value, Data, BPC (Business Planning & Consolidation)