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Author's profile photo Gregory McStravick

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.

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      7 Comments
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      Author's profile photo Gopi Ranganathan
      Gopi Ranganathan

      Hello Greg, Greetings! As i can see that the SAP HANA 1.0 Support Package Stack (SPS) 12 end of maintenance has been extended till May 2021, what can we expect as part of its sustainability? Will we continue to receive Bug fixes both minor and major along with security patches? Can you also clarify the amount of support which SAP is planning to render as far as HANA 1.0?
      Regards.

      Author's profile photo Gregory McStravick
      Gregory McStravick
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Gopi, thanks for your comment.

      SAP HANA 1.0 SPS12 has full maintenance until 2021, which means SAP will provide any kind of customer related fixes of any priority (including security fixes). HANA 1.0 SPS12 is the code line for mass adoption and SAP will continue to invest into quality. There is full support until end of maintenance.

      I hope this answers your questions. Thanks again.

      Author's profile photo Henry Banks
      Henry Banks

      thanks for the info!

      Author's profile photo Former Member
      Former Member

      Greg, will there be any long term sustaining support for HANA 1.0 offered past the 2021 end of maintenance date for HANA 1.0 SPS12.?

      Author's profile photo Joerg Latza
      Joerg Latza

      Hi Sutton,
      there are currently no plans to extend the end of mainstream maintenance date for HANA 1.0 SPS12. HANA 2 is the fully compatible successor.

      Author's profile photo Joerg Latza
      Joerg Latza

      Happy to share that  SAP HANA 1.0 SPS12 Maintenance has been extended until end of June, 2021

      Author's profile photo Denys van Kempen
      Denys van Kempen

      For a more general discussion on the topic, see