Dolby Laboratories is a leader in audio and video technologies for entertainment. To power its business intelligence and analytics, Dolby implemented SAP solutions including SAP BW initially and later upgraded to SAP BW powered by SAP HANA in-memory database. This improved reporting performance significantly, reduced data redundancy, and increased flexibility and agility. The SAP HANA implementation addressed Dolby's needs to integrate diverse data sources, enable faster decision making, and support the company's growth.

1. by Lauren Bonneau, Managing Editor
Dolby Delivers
Emotionally Charged
Experiences
with Next-Generation
SAP HANA Database
E
ven in today’s age of film and TV streaming, automat-
ed DVD rental kiosks, and advances in home theater
systems, yearly box office earnings are continuing to
increase. In fact, they are higher than ever before.1
People are
still heading out to cinemas in droves, looking for that unique
and visceral experience where they can lose themselves in the
larger-than-life visuals and sounds.2
Dolby Laboratories, which
pioneered surround sound in film with the original Star Wars
in 1977, has remained a leader in creating technologies for the
entertainment industry for 50 years — advancing the science
of sight and sound to enable spectacular, immersive, emotion-
ally charged experiences for all movie-goers and entertain-
ment enthusiasts.
“Dolby is a company that is involved in the whole ecosystem
of the industry, and our customers have a very deep partner-
ship with us,” says David McDonough, Director of BI Analytics
at Dolby Laboratories. “We work with movie directors, sound
mixers, and editors to make the most solid movie imaging pos-
sible and then also provide cinemas with the different servers,
technology, and equipment required to play the movie with
the best viewing experience.”
1
In 2015, 1.3 billion movie tickets were sold in the US alone, totaling $11.3
billion in box office earnings: the-numbers.com/market.
2
Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, which broke countless records,
grossed over $2 billion in box office sales worldwide in 2015, reaching
$1 billion in just 12 days: boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=starwars7.htm.
This article appears here with permission from WIS Publishing.

2. Goals: Enable business information to advance corpo-
rate strategies forward, make business intelligence (BI)
easier to use and increase adoption, run faster and more
consolidated reports, eliminate data redundancy and
data lags, create a more agile data warehouse, and
maintain a virtual hosted BI environment
Strategy: Implemented SAP Business Warehouse
(SAP BW) 7.5 powered by SAP HANA
Outcome: Immediate answers to drive better-informed
decisions, optimal customer service levels, 85% reduc-
tion in landscape footprint (1.5TB down to 130GB), and
faster reporting (BI summary report 54 times faster, aver-
age BI report performance 10 times faster, when using
SAP BusinessObjects Analysis as the presentation tool,
and SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation
reports 2-3 times faster)
This Dolby technology is then offered for multiple
consumer devices — that is TVs, mobile phones, lap-
tops, digital set top (cable) boxes, or anything else
that can play back sound or image. To consistently
deliver on its mission to ensure all customer experi-
ences are the best they can be, the business itself also
must rely on technology; Dolby completed a nine-
month SAP implementation back in October 2011.
That go-live included SAP ERP 6.0, SAP Business
Warehouse (SAP BW) 7.0, SAP BusinessObjects
Planning and Consolidation 7.5, SAP BusinessOb-
jects solutions, and the SAP Incentive Administra-
tion application by Vistex. The solution suite was
deployed concurrently and rolled out as one global
instance. Later, in September 2015, Dolby decided
to upgrade to SAP BW 7.4 and SAP BusinessObjects
Planning and Consolidation 10.1 in anticipation that
a move to SAP HANA was imminent.
Dolby has roughly 500 business intelligence (BI)
users worldwide who yield around 11,000 BI applica-
tion uses each quarter. McDonough, who oversees
all enterprise forecasting and BI in his role at Dolby,
is tasked with bringing data sets together through
the organization’s key business applications (includ-
ing SAP and non-SAP systems), mashing up that
data, and transforming it into actionable informa-
tion so the business can make better-informed deci-
sions, close the books more accurately, and ensure
optimal service levels and support to its customers
and partners. “We need a complete picture of our
customers to fully understand them, and a lot of data
is generated between us that is very relevant — such
as contractual or royalty statement information —
that we need to bring together to create a picture of
the entire licensing lifecycle of their current Dolby
technologies and what next generation of mobile
phone or TV they may port to the next Dolby tech-
nology,” he says. “When Dolby employees are inter-
acting with customers, we should be able to bring
up complete storyboards right away showing their
past history, current information, and future path so
we can advance the customer relationships and the
possible opportunities for them.”
Everything operational in the company — from
forecasting to tracking actuals, closing deals, clos-
ing sales at quarter end, and closing the books — is
driven off the enterprise data warehouse. Adding
volume to the data warehouse is the fact that Dolby
is emerging in new territories and launching new
products into the marketplace fairly quickly. With
the company expanding, Dolby must be able to drive
business information to identify areas of projected
growth. “We want to anticipate business needs by
providing a deeper and richer data set across par-
ticular spaces, whether it’s the whole sales operation
cycle, the complete customer cycle, or a new product
initiative,” McDonough says.
The BI group came up with some strategic analyt-
ics imperatives — such as driving business Informa-
tion to advance corporate strategies forward, making
BI easier to use, increasing adoption, and consoli-
dating reporting — and discovered that there were
some clear challenges in its current landscape.
Seeing Clearly
The most apparent challenge of the existing BI envi-
ronment was performance. Reporting was optimized
under the hood as much as possible, but without
changing the engine, it was slow from most end-
user perspectives. “We couldn’t build storyboards as
broadly as we wanted because we were limited by
the number of cubes we could build and reconnect
without getting massive data response issues,” says
McDonough. “We also spent significant time rework-
ing existing data models to build cubes to address
business needs.”
Data redundancy was also creating headaches.
Ultimately, building data cubes involved splitting
up data to run faster in specialized data cubes, but that often
resulted in redundancy. In some cases, there could be as many
as three levels of the same data in the SAP BW system, which
significantly increased the size of the database and the effort
required to maintain it.
The high complexity and layering of the data created a lag.
“We typically refreshed data nightly, running a batch process
that took about six hours to monitor and check,” says Mc-
Donough. “Some refreshes did run every hour, but we had lim-
ited capability for fast refreshes. And during those six hours, our
EMEA BI users often experienced slow performance because of
these lagging data refreshes.”
The final challenge was the lack of agility. With such a com-
plex data cube chain to maintain, mashing up many-to-many
or one-to-many data sets was taking a toll on the data perfor-
mance and architecture. “We maximized capabilities and got
great use out of the current database, but we started to hit the
threshold of what was possible. We outgrew our crib, in a sense,
and now we need a bigger bed,” says McDonough. “Going to
the next-generation database would put us into a huge ocean of
possibilities where we could go in any direction we want.”
For these reasons, the business resolved that the next logical
step was to enhance its enterprise data warehouse and adopt an
in-memory database.
Making a Resounding Case
At first Dolby wasn’t sure that SAP HANA would be the right
solution to fit the company’s strategic need. “We aren’t a tradi-
tional big data company where we constantly refresh massive
amounts of data throughout the day that we have to crunch
in real time,” says McDonough. “But we wanted a powerful
database to bring in data sets from all over, mash up the in-
formation, and provide it to users quickly as interesting story-
boards — and do this without killing performance but rather
improving it.”
As a first step, the BI team created a secondary relational da-
tabase with a subset of expansive key business data sets from
various sources. This parallel data store ran fast and was fair-
ly easy to build out, and pushed the needle on performance,
making end users happier. “The project gave us a sense of con-
fidence, and it gave the business a sense of the capability we
can provide with the proper system,” says McDonough. “The
experience helped us go to the next step to evaluate in-memory
databases that fit best for Dolby.”
After reviewing the in-memory offerings in the market, Dolby
was hard-pressed to find anything more robust than what SAP
HANA brought to the table. The solution exceeded expectations
for the data agility and integration capabilities the business was
looking for and had a strong roadmap that aligned with the
company’s future strategy. A second advantage Dolby discov-
ered was the runtime SAP BW powered by SAP HANA license,
which the business found to be much more attractive than the
full license option. Two caveats for the runtime license were 1)
Dolby could only run SAP HANA in the SAP BW environment,
Headquarters: San Francisco, California
Industry: Entertainment and communications (audio,
video, and voice technology)
Employees: 1,993 across 21 countries (40%
outside of US)
Revenue: $967.4 million (2015)
Company details:
• Founded by Ray Dolby in London in 1965
• Headquarters has 750+ employees in 300,000 sq. ft.
(63,000 sq. ft. encompassing 100+ laboratories)
• 9.9 billion+ products feature Dolby technologies,
available 85+ countries
• Received 12 Academy Awards and 15 Emmy
Awards for its contributions to cinema and television
• Reinvented cinema sound with Dolby Atmos and
acquired rights to The Dolby Theatre (renowned
home of the Academy Awards) in 2012
• Entered business communications with Dolby Voice
and launched the Dolby Institute in 2013
• Introduced Dolby Vision and Dolby Cinema (22
global sites) in 2014
• Netflix and Amazon to stream Dolby Vision HDR
content in 2016
• (NYSE: DLB) www.dolby.com
SAP solutions:
• SAP ERP
• SAP SRM
• SAP BW powered by SAP HANA
• SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation
• SAP SuccessFactors solutions
• SAP BusinessObjects solutions
• SAP Incentive Administration application by Vistex
Dolby headquarters houses more than 100 laboratories to help catalyze
innovation in science, engineering, and production, including mixing rooms
for work in Dolby Audio, Dolby Atmos, and Dolby Vision.
Dolby Laboratories
At a Glance
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3. and 2) all the presentation tools had to be SAP Busi-
nessObjects solutions. But because Dolby was using
those solutions already, those caveats became advan-
tages. It was a great fit, according to McDonough,
and a nice upside was that the business could load
as much data as it wanted into that environment.
“Whether we had a 1TB or a 20TB system, we would
pay the same price; this model is attractive for com-
panies looking to take their BW environments to the
next level, where SAP BW is the operational and ana-
lytics engine for the business,” he says. “While many
companies have more decentralized landscapes, we
have matured our BI footprint and brought in very
rich data sets to our SAP BW environment. We can
still bring in other non-SAP data sources — such as
data from our hosted customer relationship manage-
ment application, our legal contracts application,
and human resources systems — under the runtime
license as long as it goes through SAP BW, which
works out great because we have a centralized data
warehouse and want to do all our transformations in
one place.” So with SAP HANA looking like the clear
winner, the decision was made to implement SAP
BW powered by SAP HANA as the next-generation
data warehouse.
Putting the Picture Together
Next, the BI team put together a pricing model and
a five-year roadmap, brought it to senior leadership,
and got the green light to kick off the project. The
project was set to begin in February 2016 and was
scheduled to take nine months, concluding in early
November 2016. The original plan was a migration
of data from SAP BW 7.4 to SAP HANA; however,
during the evaluation phase, SAP released SAP BW
7.5. So the project scope was increased to an upgrade
and a migration. “We reviewed the new release and
decided to take advantage of the new enhanced
functionality. SAP provided a script that performed
both the upgrade to 7.5 and the migration from the
existing database to SAP HANA concurrently, all
executed flawlessly and with minimal risk.”
From the outset, the project was intended to be
a technical upgrade rather than functional and to
have everything work out of the box with little-to-
no customization. During the course of the upgrade,
the team applied only a handful of service notes
and went through a couple service pack updates to
get up to SAP BW 7.5.3 powered by SAP HANA 12,
which is currently the latest version.
From an environment standpoint, Dolby has a
classic SAP BW landscape including development,
quality assurance, and production servers, which are
all virtual servers. The first four months of the proj-
ect plan were all allotted to performance evaluation
and regression testing a copy of production in a vir-
tual sandbox. The sandbox upgrade and migration to
SAP BW 7.5 powered by SAP HANA was performed
in one week by a project team that included partner
resources. “We collaborated with a private cloud/
hosting partner on the design and approach, they did
the hands-on migration, upgrade, and Basis work,
and then we performed the post-regression testing
and some of the configuration,” says McDonough.
“The migration and upgrade will only take a week-
end for production. We spent half of the project time
with the sandbox to ensure we got everything right
so that during the other half, which kicked off in July
2016, we can move quickly through development,
quality assurance, and production.”
Once the sandbox upgrade was complete, at-
tention turned to database sizing and testing. The
expectation prior to the migration was that Dolby
would need a 1TB SAP HANA server — under cur-
rent standards, anything above a half a terabyte has
to be a physical server. After the migration, the team
redid the SAP HANA sizing exercise and recognized
it had a much higher compression ratio, which is a
testament to the team’s efficient data structure and
pre-migration modeling designs. The outcome of
that post-migration sizing determined Dolby would
only require a half terabyte server, which meant it
could be a private virtual server, giving the business
more flexibility and also less of a hosting expense.
The team then spent a few weeks trying out the
new functionality, performing complete regression
and methodical performance testing on a variety
of heavy-duty queries to see how the SAP HANA
engine would perform at the San Francisco headquar-
ters and at office locations outside of the Americas.
End-user performance was also tested rigorously.
The project so far has been without any real chal-
lenges or setbacks, according to McDonough, who at-
tributes that in large part to the team’s heavy planning
efforts and focus on the future. “We are challenging
ourselves to think about how and where we want to
approach our new future of SAP HANA views,” he
says. “The ABAP coding transformations we already
developed in the past will stay because they work, and
it doesn’t make sense to rebuild them. But we will strip
away all the cubes and shrink down the aggregates so
there is less to maintain. Then new future develop-
ment will be written off the data objects that feed di-
rectly to SAP HANA views. It’s as if SAP BW becomes
a shell, and all the real work is done in SAP HANA.
Then, we just connect the old world of our existing
structures with the new world where relevant.”
Achieving Optimal Performance
As far as results go, the business should expect to see
fundamentally faster performance across the whole
enterprise. “People will be getting the information
they want immediately instead of waiting for answers,
so they are more invested in drilling down for deeper
insights,” McDonough says. “There is nothing worse
than wasting time watching a little circle spin, and with
this level of performance, all that nearly goes away.
It was amazing to see how we could push massive
amounts of data around and build cool storyboards in
seconds.” For example, a complex BI summary reports
that used to take 4.5 minutes now is delivered in five
seconds, which is 54 times faster.
Complex queries across the different SAP Business
Objects solutions through SAP BW powered by SAP
HANA showed a 10 times performance improvement
on average. That means end users will have much
more time to devote to BI, analytics, and other refine-
ments. McDonough projects that performance gains
on pure SAP HANA — without data passing through
the presentation tools — would be even higher than
that. SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolida-
tion, which has a lot more calculations and script logic
involved, also showed improved performance. When
input templates (where data is entered) were put into
SAP BW powered by SAP HANA, performance was
calculated at three times faster and reports were two
or three times faster, depending on which one was run.
Finally, the overall landscape footprint was reduced by
85%, compressing 1.5TB of data down to 130GB.
McDonough describes the project as seamless and
one of the best experiences he has had with an SAP up-
grade or migration. “Now, we can consume data any
way we want, create faster storyboards, and provide
quicker insights, which are the real value-add we were
after. More than just an in-memory database, SAP
HANA is a mature platform with lots of functional-
ity — and SAP keeps adding more and more to it. So
when I look at where SAP is going with this platform,
I feel it is a very sound investment for Dolby for a very
bright, scalable future.”
“We outgrew our crib, in a sense, and now
we need a bigger bed. Going to the next-
generation database would put us into a huge
ocean of possibilities where we could go in
any direction we want.”
—David McDonough, Director of BI Analytics, Dolby Laboratories
Dolby’s state-of-the-art facility is tailored to the needs of the scientists and engineers who work in the labs
conducting research into human perception, sensory immersion, and other fields.
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