What are BIW and BW?

Not sure this is a useful distinction. Appears to be promoting one vendor's naming convention. ERP and BI were around before SAP made it popular.

Business Information Warehousing (BIW) is a supporting tool that provides interactive, real-time access to data for analysis and manipulation of back office corporate information.

Business Warehousing (BW) is an independent data warehouse solution that provides management reporting to support business decision making and planning.

BIW and BW are simply an efficient manner of transforming industry data for analysis.

BIW and BW have a significant role in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) because of the way industries expect data to be flexible and need to run reports exploring the resources and data in an effective manner. In addition, because of the mySAp.cpm invention, the role of the BW has received wide publicity and has therefore increased in demand.

Now SAP BIW or BW takes on a new role as SAP BI which is fully integrated with the netweaver stack. This would lead to better integration with the netweaver stack and make SAP BI an integral part of any SAP Implementation with SAP BI driving the reporting layer.

BIW is the core where == information integration == happens.

What it does is:
- ETL integration check and transformations
- stores structured information in an integrated form.
- provides tools for authorized access, explore and broadcast already accumulated information.
- gives ability to add additional high level business information (planning)
- allows tuning for custom performance.
- provides tools for detailed system and usage monitoring on all levels

What it doesn't do is:
- not suitable to process and play with transactional data
- its not a formated reporting tool for ERP
(This used to be the case until Netweaver 2004s which introduced, among other things formatted reporting and ability to create PDF.