SAP promotes ERP for HANA

In the fourth quarter 2012 of SAP plans release of the module of support of ERP for the database on the HANA in-memory platform, the board member and the chief technologist of the company Vishal Sikka reported on January 25.

The vendor already expressed the intention to implement support of Business Suite on HANA. This step will pave the way to SAP applications for the clients avoiding use of databases of the competitor – Oracle. Earlier specific date of an exit of SAP Business Suite under HANA was not sounded.

The analyst Ray Vang, the CEO of Constellation Research company, considers such announcement of SAP a bold statement. "If they are able to make it to the fourth quarter probably they already resolved a set of technical issues with HANA. It means that the company laid the foundation for the platform of the next generation of the applications", - he emphasized.

Other modules Business Suite will also be ported for HANA, but the plan and the diagram still are not defined yet, Sikka told. However, he added, beginning with ERP, the company takes an important step as this system is the central and most difficult Business Suite component.

Summing up the results of the fourth quarter and the end of 2011, on Wednesday SAP announced that sales of HANA reached $208 million in a year, having exceeded preliminary forecasts. This digit looks especially impressive that HANA became available only in the middle of the year.

And recently division of SAP, Sybase company, ported the ASE database for Business Suite, thereby having provided to clients one more way of departure from the competing platforms of databases. The clients aiming to pass from systems operating at them can select a combination of ASE and HANA "or at once pass to HANA", Sikka told.

According to him, over time SAP also "will provide all advantages of HANA" for the products Sybase. According to Sikk, HANA exceeds the new Oracle platform as a part of which the solution Exadata, a set of the Exalogic application server and the platform of analytics Exalytics which also include in-memory technologies.

He also responded to the recent statement of the CEO of Oracle Larry Ellison that Exadata exceeded HANA, having emphasized: "We have customers for whom HANA works in 10 thousand times quicker, than Oracle".

According to Jeff Viggin (Jeff Wiggin), the vice president of T-Mobile (the client of HANA) for development of corporate systems, the company receives considerable results from work of the system which was installed last year. Business of T-Mobile company is based on the services available on a subscription, and the competition in the market extremely amplified in recent years, he told. "We fight against attempts of withdrawal of our clients and we hold those who we have now", - Viggin emphasized. T-Mobile is happy with HANA, but, according to him, SAP should be made more.

First, from IT providers there have to be more service offerings with good knowledge of HANA technology, Viggin told. Concerning the platform in T-Mobile consider that there is a possibility of performance improvement. Though the company is also satisfied with results, but before to reach them, specialists had to work much in questions of setup of performance.

According to Viggin, HANA remains expensive offer. However, "if we are able to prevent outflow of number of clients, it will pay off quickly enough", he added. T-Mobile uses also the software of SAP ERP. The computing power of HANA could change a situation in some resource-intensive ERP areas, such as profitability analysis, he told. Nevertheless, to justify costs, it could be and steadier, he added.