Low-Hanging HANA Fruit
By Sam Sliman, President, Optimal Solutions Integration
The business value derived by SAP HANA’s unmatched ability to perform advanced, near real-time analytics on massive data is generating considerable excitement. This excitement will continue to grow as business leaders, on a near-daily basis, map out new and fruitful ways to focus the power of HANA on their unique data challenges and business needs.
One need only to read the HANA headlines propagating throughout business and technology media or spend 15 - 20 minutes with the HANA customer testimonials on the SAP website to understand that this technology will have an enormous impact.
Read HANA Testimonials
Transformative. Game-changing. These are terms used among industry pundits in today’s HANA conversations.
While postulating on the business value of future HANA applications is genuinely exciting and almost impossible to resist, business and IT execs should not lose sight of HANA’s less sexy but nonetheless compelling ability to generate immediate, sustainable and significant IT savings.
Just a few examples:
Reduce server sprawl
Today’s IT landscapes have become increasingly complex and costly, with multiple databases, datamarts and enterprise data warehouses needed to accommodate ever-increasing data volume generated by multiple ERP instances and numerous business applications -- CRM, SRM, SCM, etc.
Prior to HANA, performing meaningful analysis on big data meant either investing in more server/database hardware and/or reducing the volume of data to be analyzed -- the former option is expensive, the latter inadequate.
In either scenario, the duplication of data drives up costs (hardware and maintenance) and compounds latency issues.
Leveraging advances in hardware -- multi-core architecture, massive parallel scaling with many blades, 64bit address space, 100GB/s data throughput, etc. -- and incorporating SAP’s breakthrough in-memory technology and innovative parallel processing architecture, HANA brings this age-old, expensive and inefficient data volume/server volume war of attrition to an end.
In addition, HANA’s built-in Sybase Replication Server eliminates the need (and cost) for data duplication by providing real-time data replication services for SAP Business Suite, SAP BW and 3rd party systems.
For queries and analytics on very large amounts of data, HANA beats the current performance benchmark by a factor of 20, on hardware that is several dozens of times cheaper for a 200X price performance improvement.
These are conservative numbers.
Drawing down the army of data specialists
Traditionally, creating a data analysis system required extensive upfront work -- pre-calculations, materialization of pre-aggregated data, extensive database tuning, etc. -- which required an army of data specialists. Changing or building a new data model was an expensive, resource-intensive, time-consuming job.
Not anymore. With HANA, what used to take a team of business analysts and data specialists days or weeks to accomplish can be done quickly by non-techie business users.
Using intuitive, drag-and-drop tools, business users create virtual data models in HANA’s Web-based modeling environment. Data analysis results are calculated based on operational data replicated within HANA. There’s no longer a need for costly upfront work, and making changes to data models is straightforward, fast and can be done by business users.
Given HANA’s profound impact, one might imagine that a HANA implementation requires vast resources in terms of both money and support staff. Not the case.
First, HANA (in its current form) is an appliance -- a pre-integrated collection of hardware and software with all layers of the traditional ‘stack’ -- connection, data services, interaction -- optimized for a specific business purpose, in this case fast analysis of big data.
Appliances are not new. They are proven to be less costly, more easily deployed and deliver faster time to value than solutions that require customization of each stack component.
To be sure, a HANA installation will involve people with specializes skill sets -- e.g., system architects and administrators with in-memory familiarity; business analysts and data specialists to help map out opportunities, develop models and synchronize data; and BI specialists for building reports, dashboards, and other BI outputs, etc.
But considering the ease-of-use inherent in an appliance; HANA’s built-in, business-user friendly tools; and SAP’s sustained effort to make its BI solutions more intuitive for business users, it becomes clear that after an initial learning curve, businesses will be wholly capable of rapidly leveraging HANA for a broad array of applications using markedly fewer technical resources than what previous analytic initiatives required.
Reduced disruption
Built on the guiding principles of "design thinking," HANA drives transformation without disruption, enabling SAP customers to tap new capabilities and realize additional business value from existing technology investments.
HANA’s built-in SAP BusinessObjects Data Services tool provides standard interfaces to existing applications, operational software, and other business applications -- SAP and non-SAP.
This means HANA can pull data from existing data sources without disrupting the established operational systems or software landscapes.
SAP BOBJ BI 4.0 currently runs on HANA, and SAP in-memory roadmap plans include optimizing the entire Business Suite solutions portfolio for HANA and in-memory computing, which will enable SAP customers to realize additional, significant and sustainable value from their operational systems over the long term.
