Meet Jeff Word—SAP VP and global HANA evangelist, whose job is to travel around the world answering questions about SAP’s new architecture – SAP HANA. Word addressed the crowd of more than 300 gathered at ASUG Community Focus this past week, presenting SAP’s vision for HANA, which he describes as a “Swiss army knife.”

ASUGNews.com spoke with Word about the SAP HANA roadmap – including details on the BW on HANA ramp-up, the HANA value proposition, skills needed to manage a HANA database and some “details” on HANA pricing.

ASUGNews.com: What are the three most common questions customers ask about HANA?

Word: What happens when the power goes out? They don’t realize it’s the same thing as: What happens when the power goes out with your system today? Well, you have back-ups for that. Nobody thinks about: What happens if I drop my iPhone and break it? Because everything is in iTunes—you’ve already got a back-up. It’s the same concept; but we back up from RAM in HANA. You can back-up to standard disk if you want, but we’re working with the hardware vendors to make it back up and ship with SSDs as the primary back-up.

And the benefits of that as an appliance: Those drives are physically attached to the same motherboard that has the RAM on it, so you have a lot less latency. If there is a failure, you lose a lot less things in the pipes between the machines. And SSD is hundreds and hundreds of times faster than disk I/O, so you get much faster recovery times. Plus, it’s the same administration console [SAP admins] already use for back-ups today for SAP.

Number two: CIOs, and I’ve probably talked to 200 of them this year, the number-one question they ask, when we start talking about BW on HANA and the [Business] Suite on HANA is: When can I cancel my database contracts?

And the third: You mean I don’t need all of this extra stuff? When we show them the new architecture, they say, that makes it really easy.

ASUGNews.com: Let’s talk about all that stuff. HANA only supports Intel and Linux, and Oracle Sun isn’t one of the listed hardware partners. So Oracle Sun products aren’t in the cards?

Word: Solaris and SPARC are not in our roadmap.

ASUGNews.com: Can you give us some details on the BW on HANA ramp-up program?

Word: There are 50 to 60 customers in the program. It’s a different type of ramp-up. When we did the ramp-up for NetWeaver BW 7.3 it was the first time we really looked at all these ways that BW is being used. We catalogued those, and when we picked ramp-up customers, we categorized them by—it’s like a huge bingo board—we made sure we got three or four people in each of those use cases.

We took that same thing [with HANA], and went back to those 7.3 customers [because you have to be on 7.3 to run HANA]. And that allows us to test HANA in this incredibly comprehensive way as a database—so we can see every possible way that our customer is going to use this. That really gave us a lot of confidence that we’d be able to do this pretty significant shift from one database to another.

ASUGNews.com: BW on HANA is accomplished through a database migration. Can you give us a sense of the labor intensity of that project?

Word: Literally, it’s a weekend job. Nothing changes in your BW system when you migrate to HANA.

However, because of the technology constraints, there’s a lot in BW that customers had to put into that. There are a lot of other transformations and crazy things that happen that are just not needed in HANA, because you go straight to the raw data.

So the question then becomes for customers: Do I do a straight database conversion, or do I use that opportunity to clean up some of the plaque that’s built up over the years in the BW system because of successive upgrades?

With Red Bull, they were already on NetWeaver BW 7.3 and when they migrated to HANA, they reduced the database size by 80 percent. They went from 1.5 terabytes to 250 gigabytes.

ASUGNews.com: Are you making public how BW on HANA is priced?

Word: No. But it’s cheaper than most people think.

ASUGNews.com: So for customers who can’t get into the BW ramp-up program, is the HANA appliance approach the best way to start?

Word: There are quite a few things on the ExperienceSAPHANA.com website about how to start with HANA. You shouldn’t look at HANA as one thing. It’s not a hammer. It’s not a screwdriver. It’s a Swiss army knife. There are very clear use cases. The easiest way for customers to get onto the HANA train is with these HANA-ized transaction reports. Do you have any lunchtime reports? Any weekend reports?

ASUGNews.com: You keep saying HANA’s goal is to take away more “stuff” in customers’ SAP landscapes to lower TCO. But the steps to get there seem to require the customers to first add “more stuff?”

Word: We’re adding without disruption. That sidecar model, we’re adding without disruption. Yes, there’s an additional cost to it. But in the use cases customers are trying out, it’s an overwhelming ROI. One of the best reasons customers are doing this is they have one user who won’t be quiet about how slow that transaction is. And they just want to make that one person happy.

ASUGNews.com: One person? Is that really happening? We’ve heard this discussed as a multimillion-dollar investment.

Word: It may be the head of that department. They haven’t been able to do something because of this constraint of the system. There’s something they can’t do or do very, very infrequently as a result of this constraint. The head of controlling might want to come in every morning and run X report. But now, they can only do it on Monday, because it has to run over the weekend. There’s an ROI associated with that.

ASUGNews.com: What new skills will DBAs need to manage HANA?

Word: The majority of the activities that [SAP DBAs] do are somehow related to performance. In a HANA world, they can’t speed it up, and they can’t slow it down. So all of those performance-related activities are irrelevant. The DBA cockpit stays the same, but they don’t have to do a lot of the same stuff they’ve done before.

So I always have CIOs ask me: Well does that mean I can fire all of my DBAs? No. You will still need people with that deep, deep data architecture understanding. But they’re not going to be doing the tuning that they’re doing in SAP today; they’re going to be doing something much more value added. So they will have to reskill to become data modelers and data architects—but it’s a very easy thing to retrain someone in a day or two to do that, using the data modeler from HANA or the new information composer. We’re moving and skilling up higher value activities for those same resources. Because you can’t take a kid out of college and teach them all of the database stuff, and turn them into a data architect.

DBAs will still have a good career path. They’re just not going to be doing the same thing.

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2 Comments for SAP’s Jeff Word on SAP HANA FAQs

vigneswararao

Very informative, any information RAMPUP clients List?

thanks
Rao

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