SAP HANA Live (formerly SAP HANA Analytics Foundation or SHAF or SAP HANA ANALY) is solution for operational real-time reporting on HANA. HANA Live tries to bridge the gap of having operational reporting on top of OLTP system. Kind of to replace operational DWH as we know it. What you get once you install HANA LINE on top of SAP ECC/RRP is a suite of SQL views which spans across majority of ECC modules (FI, CO, MM, PP, SD, PS, CRM, GTS, AM and GRC).

They are SAP delivered SAP HANA calculation views for real-time operational of following categories

SAP HANA Live different Categories

1. Query Views – for end users for their reporting needs

2. Re-use Views – for customers to have a kind of templates on which they can base their own query views

3. Private Views – cannot be changed, forms a kind of abstraction layer for the DB tables and help SAP to keep the re-use views valid even if a database table might change. For using the query views, customers have a variety of options as they can chose from actually any BI client that offers an SQL interface. Obviously, we recommend using SAP’s own BI clients like Analysis for Office, Crystal Reports or the brand new Visual Intelligence.

Currently there are 2000+ HANA virtual data model views.

The Technically deployment of SAP HANA Live involves

1. Deployment of above mentioned SQL views into your HANA system

2. Setting up SAP Landscape Transformation Replication Server to replicate data from ECC to HANA

3. Using BI client (SAP BO (e.g. SAP BO Dashboards, SAP BO Explorer, SAP BO Analysis edition for Microsoft Office, SAP Crystal Reports Enterprise), or SAP Lumira).

In addition there are apps on top of HANA Live. Basically they are HANA apps with its own UI. E.g. “SAP Invoice and Goods Receipt Reconciliation”, “SAPSupplyChainInfoCenter”, “SAP Working Capital Analytics”.

Product was for 1st time released on December 2012. As of August 13th 2013 SAP HANA Live is in Generally Availability (GA).

HANA live has currently following components

SAP HANA Live Tools

SAP HANA Live Browse

SAP HANA Live Authorization Assistant

SAP HANA Live for SAP CRM

SAP HANA Live for EHP4 for SAP ERP

SAP HANA Live for SAP solutions for GRC

SAP HANA Live for SAP GTS

SAP HANA Live for SAP SCM

SAP HANA Live for Policy Management

With now having HANA Live, is it another step (after HANA as itself) to get rid of BW? According SAP it is not.

They advise to you both solutions for different purpose

SAP HANA Live

1), Operational Reporting – can eliminate Operational Data Stores thus redundancy and latency

2), Untransformed data (no business rules applied) – no persistence of transformations, original transaction data are used: no aggregates, no replication

3), Possible replacement for SE16/SE16N, Report Designer ABAP reports, SAP query (SQVI – QuickViewer) and other native ERP Legacy reporting tools.

BW on HANA

1), Analytical Reporting

2), Enterprise Data Warehousing capability (time dependent master data, hierarchies, etc.)

3), Information Lifecyle Management – Retention of Data, archiving, near line storage

4), Business Rules applied to the data before persisting them

5), Enterprise Information (Data) Management – Harmonization and consolidation of data from multiple sources.

Also See: What is SAP Advanced Planning and Optimizer (APO)