As SAP HANA has turned 2(Blog: SAP HANA Turns 2 | SAP HANA), it’s being adopted by our customers at an ever increasing rate.
SAP HANA’s built in application platform capabilities and not just database capabilities are being utilized by our customers in different scenarios. In this blog I would like to show the different flavours in which HANA can be consumed by your customers!
HANA Platform
HANA acts a complete platform where customers can build a data mart, data ware house, do complex calculations, analyze unstructured data, run predictive algorithms and more. This could be could be a custom built scenario, solving some very specific business problem or replace aging RDBMS data warehouses which struggle to keep with the velocity & volume of data generated now.
Our team was part of a project where customer replaced their legacy data warehouse with HANA & achieved 200x & more, improvements in complex queries. What’s more, they could get rid of lot of aggregates which were specifically tuned and built for certain type of queries! So business was not constrained by prebuilt aggregates which still took hours to run, but have flexibility & “on the fly” queries and get very fast responses. Imagine what this could do in pricing analysis for example.
HANA Analytics
HANA is used for accelerated operational reporting. This scenario is typically a good fit where customers have SAP Business Suite. Especially for the SAP Business Suite customers, there are many SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions (RDS) which are available as packages which can be deployed easily. Customers can then enhance the RDS or add more RDS packages to further exploit HANA. Check here for all the different HANA RDS which are available here.
HANA Live is another great way of exploiting HANA’s analytic capabilities with a pre-built models & reports. HANA Live has close to 2000 virtual data models & this will only keep increasing.
Customers have option of deploying pre-build report or using the Virtual Data Layer new visualizations can be created.
For real time scenarios SAP SLT Replication will be the ideal tool. The advantage with SLT replication is even non-SAP applications (on certain databases) can be replicated. So you can have a scenario of deploying RDS with real time replication and then latter extending HANA models for non-SAP applications too.
HANA Accelerator
HANA acts as an accelerator for existing transactions/process in SAP Business Suite. Selected transactions in SAP Business Suite get a big performance boost, increasing productivity & user satisfaction. Here is an example for Profitability Analysis (CO-PA) Accelerator.
HANA acts as a Secondary Database here, so no code changes or functional customization changes are required. These are accelerators available as RDS. Accelerators can also be deployed for customer specific transactions or process, after qualifying with SAP.
Our team is working on a project for a Pharmaceutical major, where a selected set of 4 high volume & value transactions will be accelerated using HANA with SLT.
As some of Business Suite data is now available on HANA for acceleration, we can use this data to quickly create HANA models & Visualizations. So not only can we accelerate transactions but also create nice analytics on real time data.
HANA Database
HANA is the primary database for SAP NetWeaver products like ECC, CRM, BW, SRM, SCM.
Please note, above diagram is schematic different NetWeaver applications will need separate instance of HANA, for details refer to Note 1661202 - Support for multiple applications on SAP HANA
In this scenario HANA is database for SAP NetWeaver products. This is also known as BW on HANA, ECC on HANA , CRM on HANA etc.
BW on HANA was released early last year and probably well first major NetWeaver application to run on HANA. Starting this year ECC, CRM, SCM, SRM have been released to exploit the power of HANA. Please see here to know more SAP Business Suite on SAP HANA | SAP HANA
Many of our customers have already migrated to BW on HANA. Our team is working to move the complete ECC system to run on HANA for a major Europen customer in beauty & hairdressing industry.
By the way, once a customer is moving to SAP Business Suite powered by HANA, HANA accelerator scenario is not required. Accelerator is only relevant for Business Suite running on legacy DB.
HANA New Applications
HANA is the native platform for new applications, like Smart Meter Analytics, Precision Retailing, Sales & Operations Planning, Demand Signal Management etc. These apps are written to the exploit the capabilities of HANA & provide amazing capabilities to our customers.
Please check here for more about HANA Applications In-Memory Computing Applications | HANA | SAP
HANA Enterprise Cloud
With the launch of HANA Enterprise Cloud (HEC), now many of the HANA applications (like Business Suite, BW) can be hosted in SAP’s enterprise-class managed cloud environment. This provides customers with multiple deployment options as On Premise in the Cloud or both!
We have seen the many different ways HANA can be utilized. With HEC customers have multiple deployment options too. Many of these scenarios and deployment can co-exist as our customers move to InMemory Platform.
See here for more customer stories on how HANA Customer Stories | SAP HANA
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