Mesmerised by toy !!!

[Former Member]

Last 6 months of my life I spent breathing in HANA and breathing out HANA. I have been interacting with so many customers (not to forget SAP, my sales colleagues, my BW colleague who is sceptical of rumours of HANA replacing BW going around), most of them back from Sapphires, TechEds and other similar events and completely mesmerised by SAP. All of them trying to consume the magic, they have encountered during various HANA demos.

They are still in illusion and those who are coming out of it are realising that it is not an illusion...That kind of performance is very much possible with SAP HANA.

There is excitement in the way customers are responding to the immense capability of HANA and this excitement reminds me on my 5 years old son who happened to see a demo of big size remote controlled helicopter toy in a shopping mall and is hell bent on having one sooner than later...to avoid his persistence I asked him a simple question, what shall he do with it? He simply answered ‘fly’ and I reminded him that we stay in a flat and there are hardly any open spaces around so this particular toy may not be of any use to us...   

I believe this is what most of the customers are facing as of now, they understand the capability of HANA and are somewhat convinced that they want to have it sooner than later...but what shall they do with it? Or in simple terms which part of their business would benefit most from HANA? How do they recognize what are the valid HANA cases? How could HANA add business value and help them having one in their own landscape?

During various discussions (including with SAP, our experiments with HANA, my colleagues and many more formal & informal interactions) I realized one needs to look at these main points in their landscape to find right HANA case –

1. Volume – Millions of records is past, let us talk about at least billions please
2. Velocity – Batch jobs are passé; let us talk about real-time that too real-real time (as SAP says)
3. Variability – Is your mind still in box and thinking with-in, start thinking out of it. This is an SAP solution but it is able to take data in from any source including SAP, Non-SAP and BW. Think beyond SAP landscapes
4. Mobility – Think of high volume analytics to be enabled on mobile devices
5. SAP Application landscape – look at your current landscape and may be you could find a right application to leverage HANA as database e.g. BW-on-HANA (you may like to closely follow SAP HANA roadmap for the same).

Talking of my son’s toy, I have not been able to convince him and am planning get him his helicopter over the weekend; needless to say I shall be sharing the experiences with his toy...may be in my next blog.

Till then you have a great weekend and spend some time thinking about the right HANA case for you. May be if you have list of cases we could discuss over coffee and I can help you choose the right one 😉

(*This blog is based on various inputs from SAP & others)