SAP has been building and expanding its In-Memory application portfolio ever since the introduction of SAP HANA in 2008. SAP Global IT has been the partner for the internal HANA adoption starting day one. The internal adoption followed the four steps of product evolution since then. If you start your HANA roadmap today, you might start with any of these steps.
[picture: 4 phases]
First came the SAP HANA Accelerators. Accelerators were a perfect way to introduce SAP HANA into the market as they provided a quick and easy way to leverage in-memory technology to speed up existing reports in the SAP Business Suite. For SAP Global IT, this became a double starting point: The IT Application Services team made first consulting and project experience with the product SAP HANA. IT Infrastructure Services started to setup first HANA appliances for the business projects, as well as for an increasing demand within the SAP development organization.
Technically data was replicated out of the SAP Business Suite Database into SAP HANA, computations were then done inside the SAP HANA platform, and results were pushed back out into the SAP Business Suite. In this model, the casual user wouldn’t notice any difference in terms of functionality for user interface except for the fact that the reports came back at significantly improved speed. The SAP COPA Accelerator is an example of one of these HANA
Accelerators and has created a high business value for the controlling department.
[picture: SAP and HPI share the passion for Design Thinking to create business value]
It was time to make SAP HANA the primary data store for an application and SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse was the perfect candidate. For the SAP internal adoption the New BI program built the framework (and created some confusion on customer side, if this might be a new product name) for the initial technical setup and identification of business value projects to showcase the new analytical possibilities. Deployment of Planning powered by SAP HANA, the infrastructure move to a scale-out architecture including high-availability and an alerting and monitoring with SAP Solution Manager have been subsequent steps. This system has been live for more than 12 months. The reduced data layer complexity, the minimal data latency time, and the much lower TCO (compared to run a BWA and a classic DB in parallel before) are still fascinating.
[picture: HANA Appliance Hardware]
SAP then started building new applications natively on top of the HANA platform. These applications all focused on helping companies leverage their growing data to solve specific business problems in ways that were not possible using existing technologies because of speed, cost and complexity related issues. These applications accelerated the adoption of the HANA platform by providing enterprises with very focused use cases to leverage In-Memory technology to harvest the power of their Big Data.
One of the most impressive internal examples is the Environmental Resource Management application build for SAP Global Facility Management, it is able to consume Smart Meter information from all SAP Office buildings every 15 minutes and able to provide operational transparency on real-time data and calculated information via SAP UI5 dashboards.
[picture: Oliver Bussmann announcing CRM on Hana go-live at CeBIT 2013]
SAP announced CRM on HANA at SAPPHIRE NOW Madrid. So, this was the next logical step for the SAP Runs SAP initiative. SAP Global IT in close collaboration with all other functions and teams migrated our business-critical CRM system to SAP CRM powered by SAP HANA through a project that was completed in record time, making us the first customer to go live with the new solution on March 5 (see announcement).
This is the voice of Robert Enslin, CRM user, president of Global Customer Operations, and member of Global Managing Board of SAP AG: “Real-time access to our customer pipeline allows us the ability to consistently analyze our business and know exactly where to focus additional resources and planning efforts. SAP Global Customer Operations is a vocal advocate of how SAP constantly delivers innovative business applications based on SAP HANA, in addition to serving as a highly-active internal customer. With the migration of our own CRM system to SAP CRM powered by SAP HANA, we now benefit from accelerating the solution non-disruptively and providing decision-making insights from the account level through senior management, anytime, anyplace.”
This is a great statement and a good reason to celebrate. So what’s next?
Expect a series of blogs and papers for our CRM on HANA project with details for project best practices, performance improvements,hardware setup and much more in the next weeks. Meet the SAP Runs SAP experts at the SAP Global IT booth at SAPPHIRE NOW in Orlando in May.
The internal HANA adoption program moves on full speed with further new applications, the SAP HANA Analytics Framework and – of course – ERP on HANA. This will be an exciting year!
Now available: The CRM on HANA Cookbook
Best regards,
Matthias Wild - proud to be part of SAP Global IT where SAP runs SAP.
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