Hana – Sap’S Bridge To The Clouds?
Cloud Society: HANA – SAP’s bridge to the clouds?
SAP announced its HANA enterprise cloud earlier in May. Does it cut the mustard?
The past few years must have been quite a worrying time to be in the enterprise software space. From Cloud Computing being the sort of thing that vendors such as SAP and Oracle wrote off as mere marketing, it’s become a key element of IT strategy for companies of all sizes.
As so often happens in this business, Cloud doesn’t mean a fork-lift replacement of what has gone before, however. Despite the rhetoric from some quarters, the software workhorses of the business such as ERP systems and data warehouses are not going anywhere. Big companies still run their Business Suite applications as single-instance traditional stacks, either in house or on hosted hardware.
This is unsurprising. The highly distributed, ‘elastic’ nature of cloud-based software architectures might offer a suitable basis for the new generations of highly distributed apps we are seeing built today. However it is less well designed (or indeed costed) to support monolithic software stacks, as mentions (LINK: http://blogs.forrester.com/stefan_ried/13-05-07-hana_enterprise_cloud_pro_and_cons) Forrester’s Stefan Ried: “All SAP products are available on Amazon’s AWS; however, many SAP customers use it just for dev, test, and disaster recovery.”
In other words, we are ending up with both types of application architecture. As a result, not only are new technologies such as cloud services having to learn to play nice with existing technologies – including enterprise applications – it also means the same in reverse.
It’s against this background that SAP invested in what it calls HANA – an in-memory database architecture. The technology allows for some pretty serious number crunching at the same time as offering persistence – the geeky term for assuring that data will still be around if the computer gets switched off, for whatever reason.
For in-house systems, HANA offers a simple up-lift advantage –the equivalent of putting a Porsche engine into a Volvo. No doubt about it, organisations looking to speed up their business apps and analytics functions should probably take a look. SAP is certainly “all-in” – as stated SAP CEO Bill McDermott at this month’s Sapphire conference in Orlando, the company has made HANA its strategic platform for future development.
In-memory databases shouldn’t simply be seen as go-faster stripes on existing technology stacks however. One of the most exciting – and yet challenging – areas of Cloud is the way new architectures are being used to handle complex data sets.
Under the banner of NoSQL, key-value databases such as Redis and Memcached are being put to a wide variety of uses that need large-scale, real-time data management, from social networking to event processing. Meanwhile, Hadoop and MapReduce offer frameworks and tools for manipulating all that lovely data.
Given its “wow, that really is fast” data crunching credentials, HANA provides a bridge to such applications, as it can keep up with the information feeds they provide. Compelling in the extreme – as the bridge also crosses the divide between the way customers can be reached these days, and the way business has traditionally been done.
Building on these notions, SAP recently announced (LINK: http://www.saphana.com/community/blogs/blog/2013/05/07/sunshine-on-a-cloudy-day) that it will offer HANA as a cloud-based service, upon which it will host its Business Suite and Business Warehouse customers as a managed service. “This is an addition to our strong on premise offerings and is significant in offering an additional choice of deployment to our customers,” commented SAP’s lead technologist Vishal Sikka.
The joint imperatives of building on a data platform such as HANA and shifting to a managed service model – together, referred to as HANA Enterprise Cloud – marks a pretty bold move for SAP. Not least in that some insiders are apparently having kittens (particularly those whose quarterly bonuses depend on license sales).
In addition, they move the core of the company closer to the cloud action. It may be, at some point in the future, that traditional ERP models no longer offer the best technological basis for running a business – they could be superseded by exactly the kinds of distributed, real time platforms we are already seeing achieve such success in other areas.
With HANA Enterprise Cloud however, SAP has created a conduit to whatever innovations take place. To avoid becoming an also-ran, it is of course up to the company to deliver some of that innovation from its own stable. At least, however, it is still in the race.