Mesmerization is over, confusion starts?

HANA journey so far has been mesmerizing (check my earlier blogs ‘mesmerized by toy’ http://bit.ly/14VBmWu and ‘still mesmerized by toy’ http://bit.ly/NBBoDJ) and I believe we are just about entering into new phase i.e. ‘Confusion’. During mesmerizing phase customers were evaluating HANA technically, working with SAP and SAP’s SI partners validating all the claims made by SAP ( about HANA) and trust me SAP has done wonderful job with this. ‘SO NOW HANA AS A TECHNICAL SOLUTION HAS BEEN VALIDATED & SOLD’. As I understand thousands of HANA licenses have been sold i.e. customer have committed themselves to HANA and struggle for most of the customers is ‘where to start from?’ 

SAP HANA as a solution / platform provides multiple opportunities (read usage type) and each one of them is so compelling that customer would like to do it sooner than later and to my understanding that is what is creating confusion in market place.

Looking at various HANA usage type one can broadly look at following main categories –

• HANA as DataMart (leveraging real-time data replication)
• HANA as process accelerator
• HANA as DB for Business Suite
• HANA as DB for SAP BW

And while looking at each one of these options, let us also look at the various factors typically considered for implementing any of the usage type, and key ones are:

• Initial Investment (read cost): HW + SW licenses + Services
• Change Management: Efforts & associated costs
• Business Impact: Immediate direct value + Indirect value + Value over period of time
• Disruption Created: Impact on existing landscape / processes etc.
• Associated Risk: Perceived Risk executing this project

If we further analyze each of the HANA usage type on key deciding factors we could arrive at below conclusions:

Detailed pointers could be picked up from the table below. These are high level pointers and shall be varying from organization to organization. I am sure organizations shall be putting together their own metrics including below key factors and more to arrive at right starting point for them. Very low perceived risk and expected value add / business impact make compelling argument for BW-on-HANA as starting point.

Key points which are important to be considered and tilt it in favor of BW-on-HANA are –

1. BW is not a mission critical system while ERP is.

2. While you plan to implement BW-on-HANA, you could do so with no disruption to your current landscape.

3. SAP allows you to run you current BW and BW-on-HANA to run in parallel with delta queue intact, so you could migrate with no pain to new system.

4. BW-on-HANA DB licence is much cheaper than HANA enterprise license

5. BW-on-HANA open up multiple opportunities other just benefiting from BW running on HANA e.g. Business Objects 4.0 analytics,mobile enablement, planning – more frequent and at your desired level of granularity

While planning your BW upgrades and migrations look for mature partners to do it and the ones who have well defined and innovative service offerings (I know one of those at least, please feel free to reach me for more details)

Please share your thoughts at here or write me an email.

(Views expressed here are mine and not of my organization)