SAP advances HANA in a cloud environment

SAP is going to offer customers the version of the software of SAP HANA (High-Performance Analytic Appliance) which will allow to unload data for processing in cloud structure of vendor, but not to unroll the corresponding infrastructure at the enterprise, one of company executives said.

The other day Vishal Sikka (Vishal Sikka), the board member of the company said that in the beginning the company offers HANA only in own "cloud" as it in public "cloud" has no possibility of the choice or control over the hardware specification.

High-performance deployments work at the systems of Intel certified by SAP as HANA compatible because usually such implementations require a large amount of RAM and use fast multi-core processors, he added.

HANA uses technology of calculations in-memory, keeping necessary information directly in RAM for acceleration of its processing. Using it, say in SAP, need of reading information from the database, its processing, and then data recording in the database is eliminated.

Being guided by small businesses, SAP is going to offer them HANA this year or right after the integrated Business One SAP application. In the beginning HANA will be offered as an additional investment for already existing Business One systems, satisfying requirement of small enterprises for receiving analytics in real time. Still demand for this technology proceeded from large and average customers.

Now the main attention of the company is concentrated on applications of in-memory. It is expected that third-party developers will also develop the applications using HANA, Sikka told. The company will have also a program of certification of applications of third-party developers. One of the reasons for which SAP does not work with third-party developers in a question of use of HANA yet consists that these applications require settings and additional functions which the company does now.

Sikka reported that SAP continues to develop new opportunities of HANA, including text search, additional inner patterns of the in-memory database. Also integration of HANA into products of databases Sybase is supposed.

The company expects that the dependence of clients on the traditional database will be sharply reduced as HANA makes progress in traditional for the SAP applications.

According to Sikk, there are no bases to doubt that the model of a relational database is very old and is based on irrelevant more idea of the equipment. Nevertheless, the head noted, business of SAP around a relational database of Sybase will continue to develop in such spheres as financial services and telecommunications, in particular with integration of HANA technology into it.