What is SAP HANA?

SAP HANA is a reinvention of the database which is designed to take advantage of the changes in technology in the last 30 years.

Depending on your company, SAP HANA is either a plug-in replacement for your existing Oracle, Microsoft, or IBM database, or a technology platform on which to construct or acquire revolutionary new business applications.

What is the difference between SAP HANA and SAP?

What most people call “SAP” is SAP’s Enterprise Resource Planning Software (SAP ERP Migration), which runs Business Finance and other back-office processes. SAP ERP can use the HANA platform as its engine (instead of Oracle/IBM/Microsoft databases).

SAP HANA is an application platform with unique capabilities not seen elsewhere in the market. It can be used as the database for SAP ERP or for a variety of other applications.

What are the advantages of SAP HANA?

The main advantage of SAP HANA is that because it is very fast, you can build much simpler software that relies on one copy of information. Traditional software relies on layers of information that are copied at different levels of detail to present information in the correct format.

With HANA, your information is stored once, and then the report or response that you require is calculated on demand.

This means that a country-level P&L report is produced from the individual sales and costs in real-time, or that a forecast is produced based on the latest available information.

This, in turn, simplifies software design and reduces costs significantly.

What are the capabilities of SAP HANA?

One of the core purposes of SAP HANA is that HANA permits the repurposing of information for many uses and layers

The most fundamental element of this is that HANA may be used in transactional systems to record data. Once information has been recorded, then it can be used directly for reporting – without a separate reporting system like a Data Mart. Data Marts are a thing of the past with HANA.

In addition, it is easy to layer on the other capabilities of the HANA Platform – from predictive analysis to text search, to sentiment analysis and many other capabilities. All of these can be run against one information store and this dramatically simplifies building complex business applications.

What does this mean to existing SAP customers?

For existing SAP customers this means that it is possible to move off the Oracle/Microsoft/IBM database and onto the HANA platform. This is a straightforward move that in most cases, produces a measurable return on investment.

In addition, SAP HANA provides a platform for consuming SAP’s latest innovations and is SAP’s go-to platform.

What does this mean to non-install base customers?

SAP HANA is in many ways most interesting for non-install base customers because it is a platform for innovation. It is possible to build or buy software applications that run on SAP HANA that run entirely within the SAP HANA platform.

These applications transcend transactional processing, analytics, predictive, social, machine data, and location information.

How can I buy SAP HANA?

SAP HANA can be consumed in the expected ways – the most obvious of those is as a cloud service, where HANA can be consumed on demand. For many businesses, this provides an attractive financial proposition

Otherwise, HANA can be purchased as an appliance that can be installed in your business.

Can I trust SAP HANA with my business?

SAP HANA contains the functionality you would expect of an enterprise platform – it contains many business continuity functions like disaster recovery, high availability, and backup, in line with other mission-critical systems.

SAP trusts it themselves enough to run its main 65,000-employee ERP environment, which runs on a single HANA appliance.

What are the main components of the SAP HANA Platform?

At the core of the SAP HANA Platform is the HANA Database. This is a super-fast information storage and retrieval engine which can store and retrieve information in real time. Integrated inside the platform are a plethora of functions that fit into several categories.

There are data transformation, streaming, and batch load capabilities to get information into HANA, as well as standards-compliant web services integration like OData. On top of this is the “HANA XS” Web Server which serves up in-memory HTML5 and JavaScript apps. This makes HANA a true application platform.

In addition, there is a set of engines that sit inside the HANA platform and run in-memory. These comprise predictive libraries, business function libraries, a text, sentiment, and search engine, as well as a spatial and graph engine., a spatial and graph engine. This means that you can build business applications that reuse information over and over without duplication or transfer of information.

Coming in 2014 are more products and features embedded into the HANA engine, including embedded Analytics and Predictive visualizations.

What does this mean? Why should I care?

This matters because the HANA Platform can dramatically simplify your business. Information no longer needs to be duplicated, cleansed, and batched to access it. It’s no longer necessary to build a separate text analysis database so you can search. It’s no longer necessary to have separate systems for GIS – you can build spatial apps directly into your core business.

Once you start reusing data in HANA to build more applications, the TCO of building additional apps drops dramatically and you start to simplify your business and remove batch processes.

From here, businesses are finding that this simplification frees them to focus on new products and functions rather than keeping the existing stack running.