Actual time before HANA is used in businesses?

[Former Member]

Hello all,

After reading through the different blogs and news coming out on HANA, I thought of the key note from the recent CEOs of sap ag- Mcdermott & Hagemann Snabe. SAP has been said to be squeezing too much out of old software and not listening to the customer.

As a consultant who has worked with different clients across countries- currently working with Saudi Aramco- I realize that large businesses on which these products depend on are not that pro active on tech matters. Now aramco is a huge customer for SAP and literally buys everything off the shelf at time but i feel the implementation and the actual benefit that they receive isnt up to snuff.

This is mainly because of their own processes- user understandings- user levels- and of course the implementation partner/vendor who is doing the development. There is still much to be desired. The IT staff is hugely burdened with making everything work smoothly for the user-modifying or changing systems to enact new business initiatives;

I understand completly the need for faster analytics but its only as good as the user who wields it. With IT spending down and businesses just catching onto the Bi bandwagon now, I would say its 2- 3 years before any large scale upgrade to a Hana system;

Plus would it be scalable with the existing bi landscape and data model architectures?

[former_member93896 · Accepted solution]

Hello Zeeshan,

I don't think anyone claims that HANA (or SAP in-memory technology) is a mature solution. To the contrary we are taking the first steps into a very exciting time of IT. It's a big shift that will rattle the whole industry (for most users behind the scene).

However, that does not mean that already today one can realize tremendous benefits (=competetive advantages) by using HANA 1.0. It certainly won't replace any BW or Enterprise Data Warehouse solution right now. But from our first customer experiences I can tell you that there are great business opportunities - things that were unthinkable just a few years ago - when using HANA.

Until we see "BW on HANA", it will be hard to imagine what a fully in-memory enable EDW solution will look like. Look what BWA did for query performance on InfoCubes. Then imagine what the technology could to to all BW processes. We plan to put this vision into reality this with HANA 1.5 (in 2011).

Things are happening quickly. So 2-3 years down the road I'm sure IT will look quite different that what we know today.

Regards,

Marc

SAP Techology RIG

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Look what BWA did for query performance on InfoCubes.

It would be interesting to hear different customer experiences on that. Based on my limited anecdotal knowledge the BWA experience hasn't been universally positive - in fact it is still to get the most desired capabilities (indexing DSOs comes to mind). Similar has been the experience in merging BOBJ tools with BW; it is still playing catchup to get to a point where newer releases have the same features that were for years already in either BOBJ or in Bex. SAP analysis, the great successor of Bex on BW side has been 3 years or more in the making, and the version now won't migrate your Bex queries, you will have to recreate each of those - if I gathered it right from one of the webinars.

If BWA is indeed the reference the bar for HANA isn't very high, though it wouldn't appear so from the feverish pitch on SDN. I for one would be pleasantly surprised to see a business customer having ecstatic HANA experience in anything less than 5 years from now, if at all.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

As one of the earliest and largest BWA customers (since 2006) I thought I would say some on this as well.

BWA was a very long journey. I wouldn't recommend it 3 years back, but today I agree with what Marc said.

I am optimistic this time, becuase In my opinion since BWA was a success and is steady now, SAP and the hardware vendors are investing on HANA. And most importantly this is not a new concept, so it shouldn't be as painful as early BWA days.

Lastly, many years back when BWA was failing every other day we were still able to run reports (by switching off BWA), with HANA 1.0 I am "assuming" that SAP will not release this product unless it's 100.00% stable. Because unlike your reporting system, you can't have a 2 seconds outage in your transactional system, you can't run your business.

That's why I am "surprisingly " comfortable this time

Cheers

Tansu

[Former Member]

Thanks for the great answers all.

[Former Member]

another thought would be the usage of authorization and lock objects. if this is all in-memory- would it also keep those relevant objects in memory as well? or use an interface to interact with before presenting to the user-

or even before sending it to the memory?

[Former Member]

I can tell you one thing for sure using BW Accelerator, Authorization objects are maintained and there is no issue with reporting. Users only see what they are supposed to see.

No additional effort is required.

Again, on the topic of any SAP new products, I share similar views. Coming from Tech world, SAP comes out with bang on any new product. In my experience that product takes 2 to 3 yrs for maturing and in case of BOBJ still work in progress. As an IT support personnel, it is very difficult to make it work with new products because most of then do not work in normal day to day life scenarios whereas organizations want ROI immediately.

One thing is for sure that SAP has great Sales people.