I'm confused.
On the one hand, I concur with SAP that the customers need HANA. Since SAP's officers meet several customers and discuss the business challenges with them every day, SAP knows a lot more about the customers' needs.
On the other hand(1), over a period of several years, I've heard comments like "add more CPU, memory and other resources because they're cheap" to address the performance issues. Instead of addressing the root cause, several if not all customers tried to mask data, design and programming issues. I've even seen customers adding more application servers and/or more dialog+batch processes when the database was causing the performance issues. Needless to say, adding more servers/processes in this case would only aggravate the problem when DB is not tuned appropriately.
On the other hand(2), I happened to read this article:
http://www.journalism.org/wake_shooting_media_confusion
Speed, data volume and Technology were not the issues. Yet it took more than 15 minutes to communicate a simple truth if someone was alive or not. More embarrassing was the fact that several news organizations including Reuters, NPR, CNN etc have already broadcasted that the person was dead. What did go wrong? Definitely not speed, data volume or lack of technology;IMO, data quality, chaos and confusion were the reasons why wrong information was broadcasted. What would HANA address? Speed, data volume and technology. Would HANA address the data quality or chaos or confusion that would ensue from real time data analysis?
On the other hand(3), I read this article:
http://www.sap.com/about/newsroom/press.epx?pressid=14609
On Dec 13th, SAP pre-announced Fourth-Quarter results. It took 13 days to pre-announce the results. Did it take 13 days due to the lack of HANA or because CI(Converged Intelligence, I read this in Vitaliy's blog Vital Outlook of 2011: Speculations for SAP BI Professionals) doesn't include HI (Human Intelligence)?
On the other hand(4), didn't we try to use more than required before? Let us take, for example, automobiles. Buying SUV's used to be very popular because there was a perception that gas was cheap. Almost no one thought about future generations. Today almost all communities(including the US) talk about saving gas for future generations. Water and power are other resources that we tried to overuse in the US. Today we've started taking measures to conserve water and power. Does anyone think overuse of gas/water/power any different from overuse of computing resources such as disk, memory, CPU etc? When we use more than needed, aren't we using more natural resources to manufacture them and generate more garbage? And what we'll do with old servers when everyone starts using HANA? Recycle them?
Is HANA really an innovation? or would developing an innovative approach to use what we've today be considered innovation?
I'm confused.
