Nov 25, 2015
We met with Wolfgang Eddigehausen, one of the leading SAP architects and HANA experts in Australia, to discuss why a business should start using this new, innovative platform, which combines database, application processing, and integration services.
SAP has marketed HANA as a faster platform, able to reduce the cost of ownership and improve the speed of operations, but there’s more to it than meets the eye.
Eddigehausen explained HANA with a very simple metaphor: – let’s suppose you need to travel from Sydney to Melbourne by car. You know it’s going to take you around 10 hours. But suddenly you discover you can use a rocket instead and arrive in Melbourne in a few minutes. Would you do that? Of course! But now you can also travel to the moon; you just don’t see that yet.
So why HANA? Isn’t HANA just another database? Is it worth the hype? We believe so, and Eddigehausen strengthened our belief with his knowledge in the field.
HANA is about seeing ahead, understanding sometimes things that haven’t been invented yet. It’s true, it does reduce enormously the cost of ownership, and it is likely to lower the size of the database to 1/10th or less without erasing data; it’s faster than any other mainstream db. Ever developed and allows simplification of data and system design and operations, as well as real-time business applications. Customers can finally begin to reduce IT complexity by removing the need for multiple Application Servers, Operational Data Stores, DataMart and complex BI Tool implementations.
Back in the 70s – he says – we had one system where all the transactions were conducted, and reports were generated. Then the data warehouse arrived as an answer to performance problems. But this introduced to us the issue of outdated data in the data warehouse, complex and inflexible ETL processes, and no drill-down to transactional data. And nobody wants an outdated database for reporting or analytics.
HANA brings innovation in this field by reading everything in real time and from the lowest-level granularity possible – the transaction, and you can only do that because it’s fast. This also adds a tremendous advantage in simplification of data structures – no persistent aggregates anymore means much leaner application code.
We all agree that improving is much simpler than inventing – concludes Eddigehausen – but we must look forward and see the ability to create something new, something that doesn’t exist yet and will enable your business to stand out from the crowd.
So is this column-based in-memory database called HANA only 10-1000x faster than the traditional databases we used “under” our systems? No, HANA is what the next generation of business applications will require functioning, we believe is the future not only of databases but of a more holistic view of business ownership.
HANA, like any other disruptive technology, has been adopted by visionary organisations that are now already reaping the benefits. It is of course an option to stay behind as an organisation, but why would one do so considering running SAP on HANA is in the meantime currently cheaper than running it on a traditional database?
This cost reduction stems from the reduced data footprint, the reduced system landscape complexity, and the faster implementation times that can be achieved. But all this only changes the bottom line of the organisation (the cost).
The real game-changer is the ability to do things that were impossible in the past and unlikely to be not even thought of today. That requires new thinking and will impact your organisation’s top line (the revenue)!
HANA is a mainstream product that SAP is currently deploying across all its systems. Expect some functionality to come back from satellite systems (CRM, SRM, SCM, etc.) into the core. But note this core is not SAP ERP on HANA, but SAP’s new Simple Finance followed by Simple Logistics and others. A purely technical upgrade to SAP ERP on HANA and Simple Finance is possible, but the real game changer is to apply new thinking.
The days of data warehouse systems are numbered for most small to medium sized organisations with some larger organisations still needing to consolidate data across SAP and non-SAP systems (but that would still be on a HANA database). The days of data warehouse functionality on Big Data has just started.
Embrace the future, or you are part of the past.
Learn more about HANA at https://www.precisionsourcing.co.nz/wordpress/teach-sap-s4-hana-cloud/
