You Spoke, We Listened: Updates to SAP HANA Release and Maintenance

We talk a lot about how businesses can survive in the digital economy – by embracing bi-modal IT, investing in new technologies, etc. But customer service is still paramount to any good business, and part of that is to simply listen to your customers. Our customers were telling us a few things: that to plan, adopt and innovate, we needed to provide them with longer term maintenance cycles and less frequent releases. They spoke, and we listened.

Today I’m proud to announce important improvements that address both those concerns. We have updated our release strategy in several key ways:

• SAP HANA 1.0 Support Package Stack (SPS) 12 end of maintenance will be extended until May 2021 from May 2019
• SAP HANA will have one on-premises SPS release per year starting with SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 03 in Q2 2018 instead of two per year
• Starting with SPS 02, each SPS release will have a 2-year maintenance from its release-to-customer date instead of a one-year maintenance
• The last SPS of SAP HANA 2.0 will have a 5-year long-term maintenance duration from its RTC date like SAP HANA 1.0 SPS 12

Our longer-term maintenance strategy will positively impact customers by allowing them to run applications without maintenance upgrade disruptions – that’s fairly obvious.

But I want to take a moment to explain how moving to one SPS release per year will be beneficial, because on the surface it sounds like a less frequent delivery of innovation. We learned that for customers, a once-yearly upgrade is the best cadence to take advantage of new and compelling innovations for new business opportunities while minimizing disruption. Within this new cadence, new customers can deploy both or either versions of SAP HANA for different use cases, and existing customers can upgrade to SAP HANA 2.0 at any time to take advantage of new and compelling innovations for new business opportunities.

We are packaging these updates with the SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 02 release, which delivers continuous innovation in several critical ways:

• Increased automation and better business continuity with enhancements in workload management, system replication, dynamic tiering, and active/active read-enabled;
• Superior usability to improve ease of use, by simplifying data movement modeling, tenant management, encryption, and user group management;
• Enhanced SAP HANA analytics with Google TensorFlow integration for Machine Learning, and added improvements in Text analysis, Graph and Spatial;
• Expanded application development flexibility with new GO language driver, expanded SQL/SQL Script, and SAP HANA express edition support for Smart Data Integration.

We have several ways for you to learn more. Webinar recordings and presentation materials will be available in the SAP HANA iFG Community. Click HERE if you are already a member of the SAP HANA iFG Community. If not, please register @ www.SAPHANACommunity.com.

Check out SAP.com for specific details relating to these innovations.

Our goal is to provide the best products and service available, and I’m excited to see how our customers run better and run simple with this new strategy.