SAP HANA just became available on the cloud, supported by seven data centers worldwide, SAP announced Tuesday. Foregoing lengthy installations, the price of admission for rapid in-memory data retrieval and analytics is now the cost of a license.
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| VIDEO: “After 40 years fighting batch ... we finally can say it is a monster of the past,” Hasso Plattner said during Tuesday’s launch event. |
“Complex implementations should go away,” SAP executive board member Vishal Sikka said in The New York Times Tuesday. “All of our products are moving to HANA.”
And HANA has moved to the cloud, thanks to SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud. SAP and its testing partners already have 750 terabytes in the remote data infrastructure, with plans to double that before 2014.
Elastic Planet
“Touted to offer ‘elastic petabyte scale,’ the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud is a managed deployment option for SAP’s Business Suite of management apps,” ZDNet noted Tuesday. “The goal is to offer another channel for trying to extract immediate business information (and value) from SAP’s in-memory platform in real-time.”
Companies can implement SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud immediately. All they need are the necessary licenses; SAP evaluates customers’ data and application infrastructures, migrates their services and charges monthly for the subscription.
“This is the first time in our history that we can really determine the hardware we want to run on,” Hasso Plattner, an SAP founder and the chairman of its supervisory board, said during Tuesday’s launch event. “HANA is working on standard hardware -- 100 percent standard hardware.”
Plattner pointed out several benefits of cloud computing with HANA, all of which reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO). They included:
- Elasticity: Customers can easily scale up the amount of hardware they use, doing so with far less latency than before.
- Innovation: HANA offers a much smaller footprint, as little as one-fifth the space taken up in pricey data storage systems.
- People: There are far fewer database administration (DBA) expenses because HANA has no indices or materialized aggregates.
Hybrid Vehicle
“The service will enable customers to move ERP or CRM applications, data warehouses or all of the above onto the HANA in-memory database running on SAP infrastructure,” InformationWeek said Tuesday. “There also will be options for synchronizing data when customers opt for hybrid deployments, with some apps remaining on premises and others moving onto HANA Enterprise Cloud to take advantage of in-memory performance.”
Hybrid cloud computing might be the wave of the future, SAP co-CEO Bill McDermott noted last week. Users who could benefit from this technology include:
- Online retailers looking to better understand their customers in real time
- Utility customers who want to model their spending and lower their bills
- Capital markets firms in need of improved risk analysis
Look for more cloud- and HANA-related announcements next week during SAP’s business technology event SAPPHIRE NOW in Orlando. SAP will also mark a special birthday that week.
Silicon Valley Girl
“Next week will be the two-year anniversary that we actually announced the birth of a little girl named HANA,” SAP Chief Marketing Officer and my fellow SAP Business Trends blogger jonathan.becher said as he opened the Global Press Event Tuesday.
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| VIDEO: Jonathan Becher, Hasso Plattner and Vishal Sikka answer questions at the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud launch event on Tuesday. |
Sikka later walked on stage to The Temptations’ 1965 hit song “My Girl.” He even wrote of HANA, “this is my girl,” in a blog post published earlier that morning.
Click here to watch a replay of the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud Press Event.
Follow Derek on Twitter: @DKlobucher
Related Media:
“SAP Takes It All to the Cloud” in The New York Times
“SAP adds enterprise cloud service to HANA portfolio” on ZDNet
“SAP Cloud Push Starts With Hana” in InformationWeek
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