Ear­li­er this year marked the tenth anniver­sary of the release of SAP HANA, the soft­ware company’s data­base man­age­ment sys­tem. SAP HANA has been vital to the inno­va­tions of SAP soft­ware over the past decade, and instru­men­tal to a lot of the soft­ware company’s success. 

ASUG recent­ly sat down with Dan Lahl, glob­al vice pres­i­dent of prod­uct mar­ket­ing at SAP, to talk about the lega­cy of SAP HANA. The con­ver­sa­tion also focused on what made the plat­form a suc­cess, and how it’s still evolving. 

Jim: SAP HANA just cel­e­brat­ed its tenth birth­day. What were some of the high­lights from SAP HANA’s first decade?

Dan: What SAP HANA has been able to accom­plish is amaz­ing. SAP HANA has the abil­i­ty to estab­lish in-mem­o­ry col­umn data­bas­es that pro­vide the unique abil­i­ty to do trans­ac­tions and ana­lyt­ics in the same instance and at the same time. His­tor­i­cal­ly, you would cap­ture trans­ac­tions in one data­base and then extract that infor­ma­tion out of the data­base into a data ware­house. Then, you had to reor­ga­nize that infor­ma­tion into a data ware­hous­ing stor­age for­mat before ana­lyz­ing it. For stock trad­ing, dynam­ic telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions net­work man­age­ment, or fast-mov­ing stock items across thou­sands of retail point-of-sale devices — this is just not fea­si­ble to opti­mal­ly run your busi­ness. This is ulti­mate­ly too slow and too com­plex for most enterprises.

What SAP HANA has proven through in-mem­o­ry data man­age­ment is that you can do ana­lyt­ics at the same time as your trans­ac­tions with­out mov­ing the data to achieve bet­ter busi­ness deci­sions and out­comes. Now, that trad­ing com­pa­ny can iden­ti­fy stock trends imme­di­ate­ly, that tele­com com­pa­ny can dynam­i­cal­ly allo­cate cell capac­i­ty to its users, and that retail com­pa­ny can reorder imme­di­ate­ly the prod­ucts its cus­tomers need. 

The notion that you could do ana­lyt­ics and cap­ture trans­ac­tions at the same time was a rad­i­cal con­cept 10 years ago. But now SAP HANA, cou­pled with the SAP S/4HANA appli­ca­tion suite, is pro­vid­ing bet­ter busi­ness out­comes for more than 14,000 SAP cus­tomers. In terms of the cloud, SAP HANA is a ful­ly man­aged data­base ser­vice that runs on all of the major pub­lic cloud providers with the abil­i­ty to scale up and down as the customer’s appli­ca­tion needs deter­mine. Cou­pled with appli­ca­tions like S/4HANA Cloud, SAP HANA pro­vides all of the busi­ness ben­e­fits — and SAP man­ages the SAP HANA instance for the cus­tomer. Cus­tomers can even choose a licens­ing mod­el with SAP S/4HANA Cloud that is based on the customer’s spe­cif­ic usage of SAP HANA. 

Jim: What do you think has made SAP HANA successful? 

Dan: The key busi­ness dif­fer­en­tia­tor that SAP HANA has brought to the mar­ket is the trans­ac­tion­al and ana­lyt­i­cal process­es hap­pen­ing at the same time to help IT opti­mal­ly serve the needs of the busi­ness. You don’t know how much work the IT group had to do to allow a Line of Busi­ness employ­ee — in the pur­chas­ing depart­ment on the phone with a cus­tomer for exam­ple — to be able to under­stand when a spe­cif­ic crit­i­cal order would be deliv­ered to the cus­tomer. Because SAP HANA can eas­i­ly answer that customer’s order deliv­ery ques­tion in real time with­out IT hav­ing to move and restruc­ture the data, this pro­vides much bet­ter cus­tomer ser­vice to the order depart­ment — and ulti­mate­ly to the cus­tomer who is check­ing on their order. I per­son­al­ly get so frus­trat­ed when I have called to check on an order and am told that I need to call back the next day to get the deliv­ery sta­tus. With SAP HANA, that nev­er has to hap­pen, as the cus­tomer ser­vice depart­ment can answer the sta­tus of every order for every cus­tomer in real-time. That is a busi­ness game changer!

Over time and with the help of more than 53,000 direct and indi­rect cus­tomers, SAP has also engi­neered SAP HANA to be robust enough to han­dle all our cus­tomers’ needs, from the small­est to the largest orga­ni­za­tions. For exam­ple, we have com­pa­nies like Cis­co that are run­ning their world­wide sales pipeline and order entry sys­tem on an SAP HANA sys­tem. I think that’s where the SAP HANA sys­tem has matured the most over the last decade: its robust­ness and abil­i­ty to opti­mal­ly serve many dif­fer­ent types of busi­ness applications. 

Jim: Tell me about SAP HANA 2.0 SPS05 and what it will do for customers.

Dan: I am excit­ed about this release for two rea­sons. First, we are pro­vid­ing long-term sup­port for this ver­sion of SAP HANA. SAP has released updates to SAP HANA every six months to a year, and our sup­port mod­el is if cus­tomers are two releas­es behind, they do not receive sup­port for that ver­sion any­more. But this spe­cif­ic release, HANA 2.0 SPS05, is a release that will have long term sup­port — so cus­tomers can stay on this ver­sion of HANA for sev­er­al years. It will be sta­ble, and SAP will con­tin­ue to sup­port it and make fix­es to this ver­sion of HANA for our cus­tomers who are using it far into the future.

The sec­ond rea­son, which I think is even more impor­tant, is the fact that on SAP HANA Cloud, cus­tomers will now have the abil­i­ty to move and trans­par­ent­ly share data between on-premise appli­ca­tions and appli­ca­tions run­ning in the cloud. For instance, if a cus­tomer has an SAP HANA-based appli­ca­tion run­ning in the cloud, but also is run­ning that same appli­ca­tion on-premise, the cus­tomer can share that appli­ca­tion data between the cloud and the on-premise sys­tems. For exam­ple, a cus­tomer might have some of their SAP S/4HANA appli­ca­tion run­ning on-premise and some run­ning in the cloud. Yet to the Line of Busi­ness user, it looks like one sys­tem, thanks to the data shar­ing capa­bil­i­ties of SAP HANA. 

A finance per­son run­ning an SAP S/4HANA pre­dic­tive analy­sis mod­el on future sales, costs, and mar­gins does not care about where the data is com­ing from. They just want the answer to their analy­sis. SAP HANA pro­vides this seam­less­ly and trans­par­ent­ly. This is a huge help to cus­tomers because there’s no longer a wall sep­a­rat­ing on-premise and cloud appli­ca­tion sys­tems. With SAP HANA, it’s one piece of the same cloth now. This fea­ture helps cus­tomers tran­si­tion at own their pace over time as they move data and appli­ca­tions to the cloud. I think it’s a great strat­e­gy for not only vir­tu­al­iz­ing data across cloud and on-premise sys­tems, but more impor­tant­ly, mak­ing busi­ness appli­ca­tions more flex­i­ble to meet the chang­ing needs of the enterprise. 

Jim: As we see more and more com­pa­nies migrat­ing to the cloud, how do you think SAP HANA has helped facil­i­tate this move?

Dan: Two years ago, one could paint a pic­ture that the cloud is just on the con­tin­u­um of cost reduc­tion. In the not too dis­tant past, just about every­body ran all of their appli­ca­tions on-premise. And then, cus­tomers began to out­source the man­age­ment of data cen­ters. From there, peo­ple real­ized that the cloud would be cheap­er, so they began cloud migra­tion with the help of hyper­scalers.

But this line of thought is not the case any­more. Since then, the cloud has been proven to pro­vide the capa­bil­i­ty to con­duct much more rapid devel­op­ment and deliv­ery of new busi­ness appli­ca­tion func­tion­al­i­ty. We see this time and time again with our cus­tomers. Some would call this a try and fail fast men­tal­i­ty, but at SAP, we call it cloud appli­ca­tion flex­i­bil­i­ty and agili­ty. The fact that SAP HANA is an in-mem­o­ry sys­tem and SAP HANA Cloud is a ful­ly man­aged data man­age­ment sys­tem allows cus­tomers to quick­ly use an instance of SAP HANA. Plus, the devel­op­ment tool­ing required to solve a busi­ness prob­lem for an appli­ca­tion area is in weeks, not months or years. This is the real promise of the cloud.

A great exam­ple of this is when the Ger­man For­eign Min­istry came to SAP at the out­set of the COVID-19 out­break. At this time, the Ger­man gov­ern­ment need­ed to get approx­i­mate­ly 120,000 Ger­man cit­i­zens who were abroad back home safe­ly. In about 24 hours, SAP devel­op­ers helped cre­ate a tool, the ​“Rück­hol­pro­gramm” app, built on SAP Cloud Plat­form, to reg­is­ter cit­i­zens and set up fast trav­el arrange­ments. We could not have done this if it were on-premise. 

SAP quick­ly formed a team and inter­viewed the Ger­man gov­ern­ment about what data the app need­ed to cap­ture. We then fig­ured out the right secu­ri­ty mod­el, how to cap­ture the data and trans­fer it to the Ger­man gov­ern­ment, and scaled the solu­tion to sup­port tens of thou­sands of users. We used SAP HANA as the data cap­ture sys­tem and SAP Cloud Plat­form as the appli­ca­tion sys­tem to build the entry reg­is­tra­tion. On the front end, we used SAP Fiori. We built the app in 24 hours and could not have done this if it wasn’t in the cloud. Before we knew it, we had more than 132,000 Ger­man cit­i­zens using the solu­tion. Today, this solu­tion is no longer in use, as the cit­i­zen retrieval oper­a­tion has been completed.

Jim: I’d love to hear you talk a lit­tle about how SAP HANA fits into the SAP Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Platform.

Dan: The Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Plat­form is the port­fo­lio of prod­ucts that includes data­base and data man­age­ment, data ware­hous­ing, ana­lyt­ics, inte­gra­tion, exten­sion, and intel­li­gent tech­nolo­gies. Right at the cen­ter of that — in the data­base com­po­nent — is SAP HANA. That is our core data man­age­ment offer­ing in the Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Plat­form. On top of that, you have SAP Data Ware­house Cloud, which builds on top of SAP HANA. On top of that, you have SAP Ana­lyt­ics Cloud that uses SAP HANA data for report­ing, dash­boards, and pre­dic­tive plan­ning. From a data, data ware­house, and ana­lyt­ics per­spec­tive, SAP HANA is at the core. 

As I men­tioned ear­li­er, if you start a report request in SAP Ana­lyt­ics Cloud, it will vir­tu­al­ize the data. And the exec­u­tive has no idea that the infor­ma­tion they’re get­ting is com­ing via online sys­tems. Every day I per­son­al­ly use an appli­ca­tion in our Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Plat­form that looks at our tar­gets for the year, and it uses a set of SAP HANA data­bas­es. But the infor­ma­tion comes to me in just one report, even though I know we have data com­ing from about eight or nine dif­fer­ent sources. 

Inte­gra­tion and exten­sion func­tion­al­i­ties are part of the SAP Cloud Plat­form capa­bil­i­ties. With SAP appli­ca­tions, for exam­ple, we can inte­grate SAP HANA to SAP C/4HANA, or SAP HANA over to SAP Field­glass or SAP Suc­cess­Fac­tors. All of our assets are inte­grat­ed through our inte­gra­tion suite. We can con­nect up to 160 oth­er exter­nal appli­ca­tions as well, includ­ing Ora­cle and Sales­force. We pro­vide tight con­tent inte­gra­tions between Sales­force and SAP S/4HANA.

As for exten­sions, these are the tools we pro­vide to help devel­op­ers extend exist­ing appli­ca­tions. For exam­ple, there many tax exten­sions for coun­try-spe­cif­ic tax codes, report­ing require­ments, and invoic­ing require­ments. A lot of times there are dif­fer­ent invoic­ing require­ments between coun­tries, espe­cial­ly in Latin Amer­i­ca. You might have a Latin Amer­i­can com­pa­ny doing busi­ness in Brazil, Argenti­na, Chile, and Venezuela. Each one of those has dif­fer­ent nuances to their invoic­ing. Cus­tomers, in this case, can use our SAP Cloud Plat­form Exten­sion Suite to open up that busi­ness process, make those spe­cif­ic changes, and then apply them direct­ly to their work­flow. Now your com­pa­ny has cus­tomized invoic­ing across each one of those countries. 

SAP Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Plat­form tru­ly is the plat­form and port­fo­lio from which SAP will build our next gen­er­a­tion of appli­ca­tions — and bring togeth­er SAP and non-SAP appli­ca­tions for max­i­mum busi­ness benefit. 

Don’t miss your oppor­tu­ni­ty to hear about how SAP cus­tomers across indus­tries are ben­e­fit­ing from using SAP HANA at our vir­tu­al expe­ri­ence ASUG Best Prac­tices: SAP for Indus­tries in Sep­tem­ber 2020.