SAP’s Pragmatic Appliance Strategy
By Sam Sliman, President, Optimal Solutions Integration
At SAP TechEd 2010 held in Las Vegas this past October, SAP reported on the progress it has made with its High-Performance Analytic Appliance (SAP HANA) first announced in May at SAPPHIRE NOW. Key takeaways from TechEd include an up-and-running, HANA-focused co-innovation program with strategic SAP hardware partners and multiple, in-progress HANA pilots underway with key SAP customers.
While SAP’s remarkable progress has won praise from industry pundits, it also has raised a few important questions among SAP customers; namely, what, exactly, is an appliance? And how will SAP’s appliance strategy impact my current and future SAP landscape and business needs?
What’s an appliance?
At its most basic level, an appliance is simply a pre-integrated collection of hardware and software designed for a specific business purpose. Because appliances integrate and optimize all layers of the traditional ‘stack’ -- connection, data services, interaction -- they are less costly, more easily deployed and deliver faster time to value than solutions that require customization of each stack component.
Appliances, per se, are nothing new. Specialized appliances for storage, security, encryption and numerous Web optimizations have been around for a decade or more.
Examples of existing SAP-related appliances include the SAP Business Warehouse Accelerator announced in 2006; the Business Objects BI virtual appliance announced by Business Objects and VMware in 2007; an appliance for Duet introduced in 2007 by HP, Microsoft and SAP; an appliance for Business Objects Crystal Decisions, Standard Edition released in 2008; and the SAP Business Objects Explorer, accelerated version, announced in 2009.
What’s so special about HANA?
With HANA SAP takes the appliance approach to an entirely new level. Leveraging SAP’s advanced in-memory computing technology and optimized hardware from strategic vendors across the SAP ecosystem (HP, IBM, Cisco, Fujitsu & Intel), HANA delivers on the promise of BI and analytics by enabling business users across the enterprise to instantaneously access, explore, model and analyze transactional, analytical and Web-based data in real-time in a single environment, without impacting the data warehouse or other systems.
How will HANA impact my business?
The appliance appeal is pretty straightforward -- reduce cost, complexity and time to value by integrating stack components and delivering an affordable, easily deployable solution that addresses a specific business need.
With its breakthrough in-memory technology and focus on BI and analytics, SAP has infused appliance appeal with an even deeper pragmatic value. Over the coming months, as SAP’s appliance strategy unfolds, SAP customers should keep in mind SAP HANA’s top three value points:
- More value from your data. By eliminating reliance on traditional databases, HANA’s in-memory technology makes BI and analytics dramatically less costly and significantly faster and more powerful than ever before, which means more companies benefit from more insightful and actionable information culled from the ever-growing volume of data they accumulate. An example cited at TechEd of utilizing HANA to quickly process massive amounts of data centered on a large packaged goods company that wanted to predict demand by analyzing point-of-sale data. According to SAP, 460 billion records were processed in a matter of seconds using HANA.
- More employees making smarter decisions. SAP’s in-memory powered HANA also extends the scope, reach and subsequent value of BI and analytics by increasing the number of people within an organization who can access, explore, model and analyze transactional, analytical and Web-based data in real-time on any device. BI and analytics are no longer confined to C-level execs and business analysts. With HANA, virtually any employee with a smartphone can tap BI and analytics on the fly to make timely, opportunistic, strategically sound decisions at the point of action.
- More innovation without disruption. When’s the last time a vendor bundled risk-free proof-of-concept and robust, real-world business value in a single solution? In essence, this is what SAP is doing with HANA. On the pragmatic front, non-disruption is key. HANA is designed to connect to a customer’s IT systems, automatically find the right data and prepare it for use so that customers can run real-time analytics and conduct complex analytic queries without impacting existing applications, systems or databases. Because HANA stores and processes replicated data in-memory, it is the ultimate non-disruptive solution. Clearly, SAP has ambitious plans and high aspirations for its in-memory technology and related appliance strategy, but with HANA SAP has gone to great lengths to provide a solution that affords customers a risk-free trial now and an iterative path to future adoption.
