LAS VEGAS—There was little mistaking what SAP’s major push at SAP TechEd this year was.

“HANA,” said the team gathered at TechEd from Canadian National Railway in unison, when asked what they took away from Vishal Sikka’s keynote Tuesday morning.

HANA has now evolved from a data-mart solution to a full, transactional and analytical database platform, said Sikka, who is SAP’s CTO and a leader in what Hasso Plattner termed an “intellectual renewal” in SAP. SAP will rework all of its applications to run better on HANA. And on Nov. 7, 2011, SAP starts its ramp-up program for BW customers to run the data warehouse directly on HANA as the database.

“There is a grand simplification that is in front of us, an opportunity to renew what we do without disruption,” Sikka said in the keynote.

Sikka, throughout his speech, tried to convince the audience that HANA would provide customers “innovation without disruption,” a familiar theme to many in attendance. He stressed that HANA would simplify the IT landscape, by dissolving the layers between where the data lives and where it is consumed. In a separate session, SAP even pointed out the benefits of BW and HANA versus BW, BWA and a traditional database—for a five terabyte database, BWA needs 21 blades, approximately $1.5 million in hardware, plus the third-party database cost. BW on HANA, on the other hand, costs approximately $200,000 in hardware and has no third-party database costs.

Down the road, applications on HANA won’t even need an application server, Sikka said. While he stressed ABAP server and Java server aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, customers will be able to run the whole application in HANA.

SAP states there are currently 100 customers with HANA projects, and when Sikka asked the audience who was interested in a HANA project, dozens of hands were raised in the conference hall. (New SAP hire Christoph Kollatz estimated the audience’s HANA interest at 5 percent of those who packed the ballroom. TechEd has about 6,500 attendees this year.)

Attendees were excited about HANA. But conversations with several customers at SAP TechEd revealed that there is still hesitation around HANA, from wanting to gain a better understanding of exactly how it works and how it can work for their business, to concerns over the risk involved in migrating from what they see as a reliable database now, to something that some see as still not yet proven.

“The transactional piece is very mysterious to us,” says Eliane Panagis, who works on SAP infrastructure integration for CN. “We want to understand a little more.”

To help evangelize HANA, SAP also rolled out a new website—www.experienceHANA.com—where customers can read blogs, ask questions, give feedback and see videos of HANA in action.

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4 Comments for SAP TechEd: SAP BW to Run on HANA Database by November

Rahul Bindroo

Wow this is what we all have been waiting in SAP BI..!
Future is going to rock..!

Reply

Jean-Michel Franco

The article mentions a session comparing the cost of BWA versus Hana. This is very intriguing. Any way to understand the rationale behind that for those that were not attending the conference ?

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Mik

I don’t believe that HANA less cost that BWA. HANA License 280 000 per 64GB unit.

Reply