SAP’s much hyped HANA in-memory computing technology has been declared “generally available.” Here are four things to consider about SAP’s self-described “innovative” and “game-changing” computing appliance.

1. HANA’s Hurried Development Time Signifies a “New SAP”

HANA’s relatively rapid development, beta testing and deployment time—12 months, give or take—will likely go down, in SAP lore, as one of the “new” SAP’s greatest achievements. It should not be underestimated just how big a deal this is: I mean, U.S. Presidents have come and gone in the time it took to get most SAP development projects and next software versions to GA. (OK, that’s an exaggeration, but SAP would never ship any lines before it was truly time.)

HANA’s accelerated push from the start to finish line is also indicative of other development efforts by SAP to move quicker than ever before: for instance, faster release cycles with SAP Business ByDesign; the creation of the Line-of-Business and On-Demand product lines (notably Sales On-Demand); and the advent of SAP’s Rapid Deployment Solutions product set.

However, with HANA’s tight time lines and all eyes on SAP, is HANA actually ready for prime time? In an interview with IDG News Service’s Chris Kanaracus, SAP CTO Vishal Sikka said: “We’re coming out of a period of time where SAP was not innovating. So yes, we are in a little bit of a hurry to show we are innovating.”

2. SAP’s Gone Gaga over HANA—When Will a Majority of Its Customers?

I’ve seen executives at oil-production companies talk less about their “pipelines” than SAP execs in reference to HANA’s sales pipelines. The oft-stated metric: SAP HANA is one of the fastest growing sales pipelines for new products in SAP’s history.

The HANA customer testimonials shown at Sapphire Now 2011 were impressive: A range of companies (Colgate Palmolive, Bosch, BASF, to name a few) kicking the tires on HANA and boasting of head-scratching advances in processing times and data-analysis capabilities.

Of course, we’re still waiting on pricing specifics from SAP (and some official documentation, it appears). Though SAP has said there will be various “sizes” of the appliance available to its customers, there is a lingering question: Will the HANA in-memory appliance be too rich for SAP customers outside the Global 2000?

3. Does “Faster” Always Equal “Better”?

If you’ve seen the HANA customer testimonials and contemplated the speed with which HANA has changed processing times (real “real time”), then you’ve undoubtedly been impressed. The Nomura Research Institute, for example, used HANA to examine Tokyo traffic information: With HANA, it could search through 360 million data records in just one second.

But as Constellation Research CEO Ray Wang has pointed out, not every business process or employee needs to access this type of real-time information at those speeds. “Organizations must prioritize business processes for real-time by business value achieved and potentially lost,” Wang writes in a blog post. “Essentially, this prioritization results in the notion of right-time delivery of information.”

In other words, while HANA can bring otherworldly time savings to certain business processes and decision-making opportunities, companies should first determine just what better business benefit will result from its HANA investment. Just because you can do it faster doesn’t necessarily mean the business outcome will be any better.

4. This Is Just Getting Started, Folks

In the United States, anyway, we’re very quick to prematurely pronounce that something is either the “greatest ever” or “the biggest failure on record.” So far, HANA has lived up to SAP executives’ unbridled hype.

But now that it’s generally available, I hope that SAP’s customers will come forth with their HANA successes, challenges, learnings and TCO/ROI metrics—we need those nitty-gritty stories.

From SAP, we can expect even more on HANA as SAP positions it in the center of the vendor’s future product suite. “We are absolutely convinced that the future direction of the cloud is the in-memory cloud,” Sikka stated at Sapphire Now 2011. What we can expect: more SAP applications that are “HANA-ized”; more details on the forthcoming HANA AppCloud; more hardware partners signing on to work with HANA; and even HANA-themed Happy Meals at McDonald’s (OK, maybe not the last one).

“General availability is a major milestone for SAP HANA,” Sikka stated in the GA announcement, “but this is just the beginning.”

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