BLOG/Webcast review by Martin Mysyk, Enterprise Architect, SAP and POC for Enterprise Architecture SIG, ASUG.
A special webcast deserves a special review. On February 29, 2016, ASUG held an extended webcast which included a review of their 2015 SAP HANA Adoption survey as well as a presentation on how the SAP HANA platform is powering Digital Transformation. The presenters were China Martens, Senior Editor, Media and Research at ASUG, and Matt Zenus, VP, Database and Data Management Go-to-Market, SAP. The 90-minute presentation was very informative and I would recommend that you watch the whole presentation. This is a recap of the presentations and where you can find more information on the topics raised.
Part 1 – ASUG SAP HANA Adoption Survey
The first presentation in the webcast was a great review by China Martens on the results of the “SAP HANA Adoption Survey: What ASUG Members Say in 2015.” As background to her presentation, Martens explained the aims of ASUG Research. To summarize, they are: to share experiences; provide data points to ASUG members; give feedback to SAP; and to use the research findings as the basis for SAP and ASUG to jointly create additional educational resources for members. You can find more information about the survey, which drew 1,253 respondents between September and October 2015, and its results here.
Good news! According to the survey, HANA adoption numbers are all up. I am not going to review the survey results in depth here but the findings included the benefits HANA adopters are reporting as well as the reasons why other companies have yet to invest in HANA. You can see the results for yourself by watching the webinar if you missed it. It can be downloaded here.
I think it is great that ASUG does these surveys, it gives you a second opinion on what is happening in the SAP ecosystem, and what people are seeing outside of the SAP marketing engine.
Just a few comments on the survey:
- Included in the survey’s findings is analysis by Kevin Reilly, ASUG’s S/4HANA Community Advocate. This is good commentary and one person’s interpretation of ASUG Research’s own analysis of the survey results
- The overall report also includes an “SAP Point of View” response by Steve Lucas, President, Platform & Analytics, SAP. Lucas keeps his remarks short and to the point and includes lots of links so that people can do their own due diligence into SAP’s HANA platform
My observations from the webcast: More people have adopted SAP HANA and are aware of the technology. This speaks well for the increase in market share and future adoption of the SAP HANA platform.
Part II - The SAP HANA Platform, Powering the Digital Transformation
The second speaker on the webcast was Matt Zenus, VP, Database and Data Management Go-to-Market, SAP. This part of the presentation began with an explanation of SAP’s approach to Digital Transformation. SAP clearly has SAP HANA positioned to be the cornerstone, or core, of all digital transformation projects for both its customers and its own organization.
Zenus started out by talking about digital business and the drivers for technology justification and adoption to stay competitive. I have seen this material before in some of the SAP and ASUG webcasts and it is starting to resonate now. The world really is changing rapidly and we need to keep up. Several of the examples he gave from Uber to Under Armour illustrated the different business model changes that are occurring.
“New digital architectures MUST go beyond traditional DBMS,” Matt Zenus, SAP
Zenus cited industry analyst Forrester Research’s evaluation “The Forrester Wave™: In-Memory Database Platforms, Q3 2015.” [You can access the Forrester Wave free of charge here.] SAP is providing leading-edge technology to enable Digital Transformation. The Forrester evaluation certainly validates the market recognition of the technology and the leadership vision of SAP in this area. It also supports some of the findings from the ASUG 2015 HANA Adoption survey which I mentioned earlier.
During the ASUG webcast, Zenus explained how SAP HANA is continuing to mature and expand its functionality. So even if you think you know HANA, I’d advise you to keep evaluating and re-evaluating the technology as new capabilities are being added all the time.
Later in the webcast, Zenus talked about a companion product to SAP HANA; SAP HANA Vora. The message that I took away from his presentation is that a digital divide exists between Enterprise and Big Data. Accessibility is key to make sense of the data in business terms. To get across the Big Data digital divide, SAP has introduced HANA Vora which extends the SAP technology landscape to Hadoop and reduces complexity in distributed environments.
Also mentioned, SAP HANA Vora works with, but does not require, SAP HANA to be installed --HANA Vora installs with Spark on the Hadoop environment. The combination of these two technologies presents a pretty compelling story for a digital platform which companies can use to make sense of Big Data.
Watch the webcast for the review of the ASUG HANA survey, then continue on with the second half to see how SAP HANA and HANA Vora can help you in the world of digital transformation and decide for yourself where your journey takes you.
