Hello Dharm
First of all, certification is a good thing, why? Because you commit yourself to learn about a specific topic (SAP HANA in this case) and by doing that you learn something new and you leverage the certification as a method to see if you understood what you have learned.
Will it change your SAP Basis career? Probably not. The certification won't make you rich and you won't all of a sudden be the most wanted SAP Basis guy out there. Certification centers saying the opposite are plain wrong.
Does it add value to your career? It can but that depends on what you plan to do with it and to what extent the opportunity presents itself that you can work on SAP HANA on the "not too long" term.
SAP HANA is a very interesting topic because the chances that it will be adopted on a large scale are very high so getting in the game early can become an advantage. It shows that you try to keep up or keep up with the latest technology (never a bad thing right).
There is no magical fairytale shortcut to success. A certification can help you out from a perspectice of learning something, validation of that learning and you can leverage it to your advantage (on your curriculum vitae, in job interviews) but it's not a sure thing that you can land a job (SAP HANA Basis stuff or even more in general SAP Basis) if you have the/a certificate in your hands.
In terms of hands-on experience, SAP offers a 30 day trial of SAP HANA (you can find it on SCN - search for SAP HANA on AWS) and after those 30 days (or immediately) you can configure a SAP HANA on Amazon AWS using the free developer license which makes you only have to pay for the running cost of the Linux Suse machine on AWS which is very do-able. According to the comments on the forum people pay around 100 to 200 dollars per month for the instance depending on how much it's used. The 100 dollar range is already a couple of hours or more per day. When the instance is stopped, the money count stops sort or less.
I plan to do the C_HANATEC_1 certification myself as well.
There is also a very interesting e-course (free) on www.openhpi.de which I can recommend if you really want to get into how a in-memory database (like SAP HANA) works internally. Hasso Plattner (one of the founders of SAP) is in this initiative and is featured in lecture videos which is great.
Best regards
Tom
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