2017 will be of key importance to SAP HANA
HANA is many things. It is an own, in-memory database manager with columnar store by SAP AG. But a radical change in the architecture of Enterprise Resource Planning and Business Intelligence applications as well. And all of this available as contemporary cloud solutions.
SAP AG are betting big on HANA. Already for years, the market is being prepared for the new concepts, while at the same time new products are being developed and launched.
But the extent to which the market fully embraces these concepts is limited, for example when looking at the number of live HANA-installations. The end-of-support date for a number of products that are supposed to be replaced by HANA has been postponed by SAP AG several times.
Certainly, there are successful HANA-implementations. Most of these are the relatively easy cases. Like replacing the database manager of a business intelligence application with HANA: a technical migration to a modern database platform. Or a greenfield implementation of Simple Finance: an implementation with a limited functional scope and without the burden of migrating existing SAP-applications.
However, the easy cases are not in line with the high expectations as they have been set for HANA by SAP AG.
Who combines his OLTP- and OLAP-solutions on a single, live database-instance currently? Who has pushed down the application code for financial and supply chain processes to a live HANA-environment? Or who will achieve this in line with current plans in 2017? Virtually nobody.
Meanwhile, new innovative products and technologies as part of HANA are being announced and made available. For example, HANA 2.0 and HANA Cloud Platform in November 2016.
Existing SAP-customers need to take care of their businesses, and very often have a fair deal of complexity to manage in their current SAP application landscape. This is why they will wait until the advantages of using HANA will become visible to them, and until the risks relating to adopting HANA can be controlled. In other words: until there is a business case.
In order to bring reality somewhat in line with expectations set by SAP AG, HANA will have to gain momentum in 2017, like in more live installations and in projects for the application of a broad range of HANA functions and scenarios.
SAP AG are betting big on HANA. 2017 will be of key importance to SAP HANA. This is why 2017 will also be of key importance to SAP AG.