[1] It can transform and consolidate business information from virtually any source system.
[citation needed] It ran on industry standard RDBMS until version 7.3 at which point it began to transition onto SAP's HANA in-memory DBMS, particularly with the release of version 7.4.
Consequently, this facilitates the push down of complex OLAP based functions to the database as opposed to NetWeaver ABAP Application Server to improve performance.
[citation needed] The product is also more open and can incorporate SAP and Non-SAP data more easily.
Since then, SAP BW has evolved to become a key component for thousands of companies.