For: Application
Development
& Delivery
Professionals
SAP Hana Is The Answer! What’s The
Question?
by Holger Kisker, Ph.D., George Lawrie, and Noel Yuhanna, November 25, 2014
Key Takeaways
SAP Hana Has Many Different Use Cases
Since its first announcement of SAP Hana in 2010, SAP has significantly invested in
the technology and expanded its capabilities. Companies interested in SAP Hana need
to understand that it can be used as a super-fast database, a data warehouse, a data
integration layer, and in many more scenarios leveraging its in-memory, high-speed
performance.
Separate The Hype From Reality About SAP Hana
Not all Hana use cases are at the same level of maturity; some are well established, but
others, such as the ability to process granular transactions in real time, demand process
redesign to fully capture their potential. Customers need to decide if they want to
engage with SAP on an innovation path or travel the well-established roadways.
Build Your SAP Hana Road Map To Fully Leverage Your Investment
Different Hana use cases require different licenses from SAP. Customers need to
understand what it takes to use the solution in different scenarios and leverage their
investments over time to take full advantage of its spectrum of capabilities.
Forrester Research, Inc., 60 Acorn Park Drive, Cambridge, MA 02140 USA
Tel: +1 617.613.6000 | Fax: +1 617.613.5000 | www.forrester.com
For Application Development & Delivery Professionals
November 25, 2014
SAP Hana Is The Answer! What’s The Question?
Demystifying SAP’s In-Memory Solution
by Holger Kisker, Ph.D., George Lawrie, and Noel Yuhanna
with Leslie Owens, David Murphy, and Sophia Christakis
Why Read This Report
SAP Hana is SAP’s latest flagship technology, and it seems to be the company’s silver-bullet response to
almost every question. There is, however, a good reason behind this, as SAP has extensively expanded
SAP Hana’s capabilities in many different directions since its introduction in 2010. Unfortunately, this
has created some confusion in the market when it comes to understanding what SAP Hana actually
can do, what it’s already used for, how to get started, and how to leverage related investments over time.
Application development & delivery (AD&D) professionals and their peers need to understand the various
use case scenarios of SAP Hana to be able to separate the hype from reality and know what it takes to
leverage different SAP Hana licensing options and unlock its full potential for their business.
Table Of Contents
Notes & Resources
2 SAP Hana Has Many Faces And Use Cases
Forrester interviewed SAP and many of
its SAP Hana customers and partners,
including Atos, Deloitte Development, HCL
Technologies, IBM, Infosys, ITC Infotech,
Molson Coors Brewing, Syntel, Tech
Mahindra, Under Armour, Visy, and Wipro.
SAP Hana Is A Data Warehouse
SAP Hana Is A Database
SAP Hana Is An Analytics Appliance
SAP Hana Is An Integration Middleware
SAP Hana Is An Application Server
SAP Hana Is A Development Environment
SAP Hana Is A Cloud Platform
recommendations
13 Understand And Tap Into The Full Potential
Of SAP Hana
13 Supplemental Material
Related Research Documents
The Forrester Wave™: SAP Services
Providers, Q1 2014
January 29, 2014
Case Study: Maple Leaf Foods Relies
On SAP Hana To Enable Faster Business
Analytics
October 28, 2013
SAP Modernization
May 29, 2013
© 2014, Forrester Research, Inc. All rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited. Information is based on best available
resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. Forrester®, Technographics®, Forrester Wave, RoleView, TechRadar,
and Total Economic Impact are trademarks of Forrester Research, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective companies. To
purchase reprints of this document, please email [email protected]. For additional information, go to www.forrester.com.
For Application Development & Delivery Professionals
SAP Hana Is The Answer! What’s The Question?
2
Sap Hana Has Many Faces And Use Cases
In most discussions today with SAP representatives, it’s very likely that the answer to almost
any question that AD&D professionals ask is “SAP Hana.” Over time, this can build to a level of
frustration, or even annoyance, for interested clients. However, there’s a good reason behind this:
Since the first announcement of SAP Hana in May 2010 and the first shipment in November of
the same year, SAP has significantly invested into its new flagship technology and expanded its
capabilities in a number of different ways. It can be used for online analytics processing (OLAP), for
online transaction processing (OLTP), and on-premises as well as in the cloud, integrating different
worlds into one architecture (see Figure 1).
Today, SAP Hana can be used in a wide range of different capabilities and use cases, and it’s fair to
say that SAP is betting its future on the success of its new flagship technology. Of course, there are
a number of other in-memory solutions available in the market, such as those from Oracle, IBM,
Microsoft, Pivotal, and Teradata, and analytics appliances as well as integration middleware or cloud
solutions. This report provides some transparency about the different capabilities and use case
scenarios for SAP Hana, separates hype from reality, and provides some concrete implementation
examples and advice on how to best plan, implement, and leverage any investment into SAP’s Hana
solution. In this report, we’re not looking at the competitive landscape or comparing alternative
(point) solutions for individual use cases but are focusing solely on the spectrum of SAP Hana
capabilities, as shown in this architectural graphic of SAP Hana, provided by SAP (see Figure 2).
© 2014, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited
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SAP Hana Is The Answer! What’s The Question?
Figure 1 The SAP Hana “Power Plant” Architecture Integrates Different Worlds
OLTP
(Online transactional processing)
OLAP
(Online analytical processing)
SAP Hana as a cloud platform
(offers all of the below options)
Cloud
On-premises
SAP Hana
as a
development
platform
SAP Hana as
an application
server
SAP Hana as
an analytics
appliance
SAP Hana
as a data
warehouse
SAP Hana as a database
SAP Hana as an integration middleware
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SAP Hana Is The Answer! What’s The Question?
4
Figure 2 The SAP Hana Platform Is More Than Just A Database
Source: SAP website
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SAP Hana Is A Data Warehouse
This is the most common use case scenario today in the market — SAP Hana as a high-speed inmemory data mart. In many straightforward scenarios, customers of SAP Hana continue to do the
same reporting on the same set of data sources but with significant acceleration, by a factor of 100
to 1,000-plus, depending on the specific scenario. In most cases, customers are not replacing their
existing large data warehouse with SAP Hana because of cost and limitations on large-scale data
warehouse implementation but are complementing it to support (near) real-time analytics and new
business insights. However, other examples exist where some customers have consolidated their
heterogeneous smaller data warehouse landscape on SAP Hana, to the extent that sizing allows.
Today, the largest SAP Hana implementations go beyond 10 terabytes, although most are between 1
and 5 terabytes. SAP has internally tested SAP Hana to scale to 100 terabytes.
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SAP Hana Is The Answer! What’s The Question?
■ Capabilities and differentiators. SAP Hana is a full-fledged database management system,
one of the leading in-memory column-store relational database platforms that run massively
parallel across multiple nodes in a clustered configuration. Unlike many other solutions in the
marketplace, Hana is not a bolt-on indexing solution to enhance what is essentially a disk-based,
OLTP database engine. SAP Hana was built from the ground up as an in-memory solution to
address challenges that customers were facing with their growing SAP business application and
business intelligence (BI) platforms. However, the limitation is that if it cannot fit into dynamic
random-access memory (DRAM), SAP Hana cannot run; it cannot have partial data on disk
and memory. SAP Hana allows only for complete data in-memory. Enterprises are using SAP
Hana for in-memory data marts and SAP Business Warehouse (BW) implementations that
integrate with other data warehouses, including SAP Sybase IQ.
■ Market adoption and licensing. According to SAP, Hana has more than 3,600 customers today.
However, Forrester estimates that a third of these are production customers, most of which
are using it as a (complementary) in-memory data warehouse. The most dominant licensing
of choice is the SAP Hana Enterprise Edition license, which covers the usage for most of the
described scenarios in this report. However, customers explicitly interested in running BW on
SAP Hana can license Hana in two ways:1
1.By units of 64 gigabytes. This is priced as a flat fee per unit for up to 10 units, and the price
then decreases with every additional 10 units a customer buys. Future licensing purchases are
accretive and retroactive.
2.By software application value. Customers pay a percentage of their total SAP purchase
price and receive an unlimited runtime license for BW. This licensing option is also available,
including enterprise resource planning (ERP) on Hana.
For enterprises that want to leverage enterprise data warehouses (EDWs) on a cloud platform,
SAP Hana is available on Amazon Web Services, although currently most are small-to-midsized
deployments that are mostly less than a few terabytes in size.
■ Customer examples. Molson Coors Brewing uses Hana as a data warehouse to simplify and
accelerate its business intelligence architecture. Molson Coors Brewing did not initially redesign
any reporting; it moved BW to the Hana platform to run its reports faster.
“Specific to Molson, we didn’t redesign the solutions, although we know that others have. The
jobs we ran were overrunning our overnight processing window. We still use ETL (extract,
transform, and load), and the Hana migration was a simple technical upgrade, since we don’t
directly report on any Hana views. At this point in time, we don’t do real-time reporting . . .
it’s not in the near future for us.” (BI solution specialist, Molson Coors Brewing)
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SAP Hana Is The Answer! What’s The Question?
Other clients running BW on Hana include CIR Food, Frucor Beverages, Hilti, Home Trust,
Koehler Paper Group, Lenovo, NongFu Spring, OJSC Surgutneftegas, Schukat Electronic,
Southern California Edison, USHA International, and many more.2
■ Systems integrators (SIs) with experience in migration. Syntel helped an insurance firm with
more than 5 million records in BW upgrade and convert the existing system to Unicode (SAP
NW BW 7.31 to SAP NW 7.4), to migrate from Oracle to Hana Database, to redesign and
optimize the huge database and applications to SAP BW Powered by Hana, and to deliver a
unified solution for Business Warehouse and planning and consolidation on SAP Hana.
HCL Technologies helped a global consumer goods company that is over 100 years old and
whose double-digit growth in recent years required a new organizational structure. Its BI
solution was unable to adapt to the new structures or cater to the increasing data sources that
had to be integrated.
“The project justification of ‘pain points’ will always come from business. It’s rarely just the
speed of reporting.” (BI project manager, HCL Technologies)
SAP Hana Is A Database
This use case describes SAP’s long-term vision for SAP Hana — replacing traditional disk-based
databases with a persistent in-memory database for (near) real-time business, like other vendors
such as IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle. Of course, this comes with a number of challenges, including
backup and recovery (once you pull the plug, all in-memory data is obviously gone), sizing (as
many companies have hundreds of terabytes or petabytes of data in their databases), cost (as inmemory is generally a high-cost data storage technology), and more. However, SAP has proven the
technical and economic feasibility of this truly transformational use case scenario in the market
with many of its customers.
■ Capabilities and differentiators. At the core, SAP Hana is a distributed in-memory columnar
massively parallel processing (MPP) database engine that delivers high performance and scale
for transactional, operational, and analytical workloads. Unlike other in-memory databases,
SAP Hana enables converged OLTP and OLAP data processing with one atomic copy, offers full
atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability (ACID) compliance, eliminates data redundancy,
and delivers low-latency data access. Like other in-memory database solutions, SAP Hana has
the capability to support structured, unstructured, and semi-structured data within the same
schema and offers data compression to reduce memory requirements. Processing engines,
libraries, and an application server within the platform allow for aggressive push-down of logic
to the database.
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SAP Hana Is The Answer! What’s The Question?
■ Market adoption and licensing. Today, SAP has about 50-plus customers that are running their
SAP Business Suite on SAP Hana as an in-memory database. However, several thousand more
have the license to do so as part of their SAP Enterprise License, representing a huge pool of
potential future users over time. The Hana Database is available as a runtime license, full-use
license, or base-plus-options license. Cloud-based subscription licensing is also available. In
general, all of SAP’s Business Suite and Industry Solutions can run on Hana (see Figure 3). An
additional list of SAP solutions that can run on SAP Hana is available online.3
■ Customer examples. Vodafone deploys Hana to slash global month-end close to five days.
With billions of rows of data and a large number of people involved, month-end closing
initially took seven business days. Vodafone eliminated one day from closing by using process
improvements, but saving a second day required performing computations far more quickly.
Closing requires three or four iterations of 5 hours of elaboration and replication. SAP Hana
cut data extract, processing, and load times from 2.5 hours down to 6 minutes, saving a second
day and compressing the global close to 5 days. Faster access to month-end closing data enabled
the business to analyze the general ledger in real time, running as many iterations of the closing
as required to give a true and fair view and satisfying Vodafone’s curiosity about the business
rather than suffering an arbitrary cut-off. Under Armour leverages Hana to optimize “fill
rate.” The sales operations team at Under Armour could run allocation only at night or on the
weekend. With Hana, the nightly batch process moves to an hour in the afternoon, allowing the
teams to move product from the warehouse to the right stores.4
“Even a half-percent increase in fill rate for us is worth $10 million in additional revenue.”
(Senior director of enterprise applications, Under Armour)
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SAP Hana Is The Answer! What’s The Question?
Figure 3 SAP Solutions/Elements Running On SAP Hana As An In-Memory Database
SAP Business Suite
SAP Supplier InfoNet
SAP Operational Process
Intelligence
SAP CRM
SAP Fraud Management
SAP Liquidity Risk
Management
SAP BW
SAP Smart Meter Analytics
SAP Demand Signal
Management
SAP Simple Finance
SAP Customer Usage
Analytics
SAP Customer
Engagement Intelligence
SAP CO-PA
Accelerator
SAP Customer
Segmentation Accelerator
SAP Collections Insight
SAP Finance and
Controlling Accelerator
SAP Sales Analysis for
Retail
SAP Accelerated Trade
Promotion Planning
SAP Sales and
Operations Planning
SAP Sales Pipeline Analysis
SAP Lumira Server
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SAP Hana Is An Analytics Appliance
The first introduction of SAP Hana in 2010 was as an analytics appliance solution (combining a
partner’s hardware and SAP’s software) for analytics workloads, hence the name High Performance
Analytics Appliance.5 The Hana appliances can run analytic workloads on top of the in-memory
engine, acting pretty much as a an accelerated data mart, but can push it into the in-memory layer
as well, supporting a number of predefined algorithms for predictive, geospatial, and text analytics
by SAP as well as open interfaces to other libraries and languages.
■ Capabilities and differentiators. SAP Hana is complementary to analytical solutions such
as IBM Cognos, Qlik, SAPBusinessObjects BI, and SAS, but it’s also an analytical platform
that runs on an appliance combining the hardware and software. SAP Hana as an analytical
appliance can support real-time analysis on OLTP data without having to create or support
multiple copies of data. In addition, it can push application and business logic down from the
analytical queries and applications to the database engine to support all kinds of data, including
structured, semi-structured, and unstructured. Like other in-memory solutions such as
IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle, SAP Hana supports 31 languages for linguistic mark-up and an
extraction dictionary and 11 languages for predefined core extractions.
■ Market adoption and licensing. SAP does not release numbers of adoption by capability or
numbers of customers in production for the different use cases. However, since SAP Hana was
first introduced in 2010 as an analytics appliance solution, and based on client interest and
inquiries we receive at Forrester, we estimate there are some hundreds of customers using this
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SAP Hana Is The Answer! What’s The Question?
Hana capability. To run SAP Hana as an appliance, the base-plus-option license will be the
dominate choice, though SAP offers multiple other licensing arrangements (both on-premises
and cloud-based) for flexible deployment terms.
■ Customer examples. SAP’s partner Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) helped AGL improve
energy-demand forecasting when it placed analog with digital meters. It deployed the Hana
database and analytics to manage the 4,320-fold increase in daily data processing that resulted
from AGL replacing its electromechanical meters with interactive smart meters in 2.2 million
homes and 300,000 businesses throughout the state of Victoria in Australia. The project enabled
AGL to work smarter in forecasting and data analytics to improve business performance.
Maple Leaf Foods, in common with many other fast-growing firms, runs multiple ERP solutions.
It lacked the granular timely data required for real-time decision-making.6 The company
implemented Hana to analyze sales and margin by product line and customer, regardless of the
particular ERP manufacturing and shipping the order.
Capgemini developed and deployed a certified Hana application targeting the need to analyze in
real time to customer point-of-sale data to prompt next best action and offer complementary or
substitute merchandise to save the sale, increase average order value, and retain customer loyalty.
SAP Hana Is An Integration Middleware
SAP Hana can be used as the data integration in-memory layer between all of an enterprise’s data
sources and data-consuming applications and services. Hana can serve as a data services layer by
integrating with SAP data services, SAP replication, and SAP PowerDesigner with in-memory speed
to provide access to all data without the need of loading or moving it first.
■ Capabilities and differentiators. SAP Hana integrates with SAP Data Services, SAP Replication
Server, SAP Hana Cloud Integration, and the SAP Hana core engine to deliver a comprehensive
integration middleware. It delivers Smart Data Access (SDA) that enables integration without data
movement and in-memory capabilities that enable the platform to support ELT (extract, load, and
transform) and ETL scenarios. This creates agility, as transformation logic can rapidly be changed
without requiring data reload for the changes to take effect.
■ Market adoption and licensing. Today, more than a hundred enterprises are using SAP Hana
as an integration middleware, along with SAP Data Services and SAP Replication server, to
integrate various data sources, including SAP business suite and databases and files, cloud, and
SaaS data. Direct Extractor Connection (DXC), SAP Landscape Transformation (SLT), and Data
Integrator are included in the full-use license. Replication and data management (data services and
information steward), streaming, etc., are listed as separate options in the base-plus-option license.
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■ Customer examples. ConAgra Foods is a global consumer goods manufacturer with more
than 26,000 employees and annual revenues of more than $13 billion. The company needed to
improve and accelerate its financial closing and forecasting, integrating data from its planning
systems and from its channel partners. With the median promotion in grocery lasting only
two weeks, consumer packaged goods (CPG) manufacturers active in multiple markets and
supporting multiple brands, promotional variants, and new product introductions need
to integrate planning and performance fast to respond to market uptake. ConAgra Foods
chose to deploy SAP’s forecasting and controlling on Hana, experiencing faster data access
and transactions, using existing or slightly enhanced SAP ERP functionality with minimal
disruption to end users and a three-day reduction in the critical month-end forecasting cycle.
The value of faster closing or real-time processes, however, depends on the way in which a
business runs. Most firms essentially work on a cycle of weeks or months and may even resist
the idea of real-time monitoring, insisting, for example, that some costs of a business, such as
depreciation or leases, necessarily belong to a period of account, such as a month.
This example illustrates the requirement for AD&D professionals to think carefully about the
real value of Hana and recruit line-of-business colleagues to process reengineering workgroups.
Forrester found that some SAP customers complained that Hana was costly — usually because
they were still running their businesses in the same way, with the same BW reports and the
same cyclical processes as they had previously.
SAP Hana Is An Application Server
Unlike traditional application server architectures, many of SAP’s apps can run directly on SAP
Hana without additional external servers or application servers. This can save money by eliminating
additional hardware and application server licenses.
■ Capabilities and differentiators. SAP Hana embeds a full-featured application server, web
server, and development environment within the SAP Hana platform itself. However, this isn’t
just another piece of software installed on the same hardware as SAP Hana; instead, SAP has
decided to truly integrate this new application services functionality directly into the SAP Hana
database, delivering extreme speed. SAP Hana’s web application server supports JavaScript and
HTML5. SAP Hana offers a built-in web server to access static content stored in the SAP Hana
repository.
■ Market adoption and licensing. To use SAP Hana as an application server, there is no
additional licensing required. This is an embedded capability of every type of Hana deployment
(on-premises, cloud, etc.) and license.
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SAP Hana Is The Answer! What’s The Question?
■ Customer example. Newell Rubbermaid cleaned up its key performance indicators (KPIs)
with Hana. The company had multiple tools and dashboards for different business users. With
a plethora of group firms and definitions of aggregate variables such as “revenue” or “cost of
sale,” Newell Rubbermaid suffered from the familiar challenge of inconsistent data, frustrating
enterprisewide response to threats and opportunities.7 Building real-time dashboards for all
roles from the same granular data sources enabled Newell to finally get all stakeholders a
common view of the business and a common platform for decisions and action.
SAP Hana Is A Development Environment
SAP has attracted a significant ecosystem of companies that develop applications using and
based on the SAP Hana platform. In addition to partners, customers are using Hana for custom
enhancements or developing their own new solutions. SAP Hana offers a full development
environment that supports different development languages, debugging, versioning, and transport.
■ Capabilities and differentiators. SAP Hana is an open platform that allows developers to
build new applications using open source HTML5, Server-side JavaScript, SQL, and .NET.
development languages. It offers a powerful, eclipse-based, integrated development environment
(IDE) that is used to develop artifacts on a Hana server. It enables technical users to manage the
SAP Hana database, create and manage user authorization, and create new or modify existing
data models. SAP Hana, as a development environment, allows developers to access, process,
and integrate structured, social data, customer data, machine data, and geospatial data from a
single SQL script. A unique feature in Hana is the ability to store source code and design time
objects in the in-memory database, even when deployed in production.
■ Market adoption and licensing. According to SAP, there are currently more than 1,500 startup
companies in 57 countries developing solutions on SAP Hana.8 Customers/partners need to
have a standard full-use license to use the Hana development capabilities, but other than that,
there is no additional license, key, or registration needed to develop solutions on the Hana
platform. Any user on any Hana system can perform development tasks (as long as they are
granted the appropriate roles by their system administrator). As a result, there are likely many
more companies/customers that are developing solutions on SAP Hana but are not tracked for
using this capability.
■ Customer examples. In July 2014, SAP ran a competition in China to see which firms could
develop the most impressive Hana application.9 Established SIs like Capgemini have developed
Hana-based applications such as Market Basket Analysis 1.0 and Next Best Action 1.0 that
clearly target retail and consumer use cases. Syntel developed a specific solution for an insurance
client, delivering real-time risk analysis of more than 6 million records. Deloitte Development
delivered a more horizontally targeted liquidity management application that also capitalized
on Hana strengths. As with all SI-developed solutions, savvy AD&D professionals should look
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SAP Hana Is The Answer! What’s The Question?
to understand the degree to which the solution is sufficiently generalized for a broad market
rather than for the original commissioning clients, the arrangements for functional and technical
support, and the long-term migration path and release level dependencies, if any.
SAP Hana Is A Cloud Platform
SAP Hana is also an in-memory cloud platform-as-a-service that allows enterprises to extend and
run SAP Hana applications in the cloud. All the previously described Hana use case scenarios can
be used by customers as cloud services provided by SAP.
■ Capabilities and differentiators. SAP Hana in the cloud offers complete functionality that’s
available on-premises. As with every cloud solution, customers will, of course, need to live with
less flexibility regarding modifications and release cycles. SAP Hana platform services include:
1) SAP Hana infrastructure services to deploy and manage SAP Hana in the cloud, requiring no
hardware investment or setup time; 2) SAP Hana DB Services, which deliver fast provisioning
of SAP Hana supporting core database services, development services, and libraries; and 3) SAP
Hana App Services that allow creating, deploying, and extending real-time applications in the
cloud. In addition, SAP Hana Cloud Portal allows developers to create websites in the cloud that
bring together structured and unstructured content. The SAP Hana Cloud Integration facilitates
the integration of business processes and data across on-premises and cloud applications.
■ Market adoption and licensing. SAP offers a variety of subscription models for the SAP Hana
Cloud Platform, including infrastructure services, database services, or application services on a
monthly basis.10 Bring-your-own-license (BYOL) and full-subscription licenses are available.
■ Customer examples. The National Football League (NFL Enterprises) drives loyalty with SAP
Hana Cloud Platform and SAP Lumira Cloud. Anyone — particularly a foreigner — watching
American football knows it generates a huge volume of statistics, with each play subject to minute
analysis. NFL Enterprises is a direct-to-consumer brand and needed a highly scalable, real-time
platform to engage its loyal fans and attract new supporters. The immersive fantasy football
application that NFL Enterprises developed enables thousands of fans to compare players and
make decisions about their fantasy teams in real time, taking the latest plays into account.11
The Hamburg Port Authority (HPA) deploys Hana to manage increased turnover and reduce
carrier idle time. The Hamburg Port Authority turns over 9 million containers annually but by
2025 expects an annual turnover of 25 million, requiring more traffic in the port’s restricted
space. The HPA’s Smart Port Logistics solution runs on Hana Cloud and connects carriers and
shippers, alerting them to capacity bottlenecks and available parking spaces. It even includes
traffic data from the German Automobile Association. Drivers receive only the data they need,
and shippers know just when to prepare containers for pickup. The cloud enables the Hamburg
Port Authority to manage fluctuations in traffic but also to collaborate with different partners.
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R e c o m m e n d at i o n s
Understand And Tap Into The Full Potential Of Sap Hana
SAP Hana has significantly extended its capabilities since its first market introduction in 2010.
But many of the use case scenarios don’t yet have a strong market adoption, focus mainly on the
installed base, or are difficult to justify with a solid business case. AD&D professionals at companies
interested in or committed to use SAP Hana need to maximize the benefits from their companies’
investments by building a road map that extends their Hana use case footprint over time:
■ Understand your Hana license options. SAP Hana can be expensive, and organizations
need to understand the return on investment before committing to a long-term strategy.
AD&D pros need to understand what license their company currently holds for SAP Hana
(if any) and what license is required for the first use case to get started.
■ Expand your usage of Hana over time. If you start by accelerating your existing reports, using
Hana as an in-memory data mart, consider, as a next step, using it as an analytics appliance for
some advanced analytic technologies, such as predictive, that run natively within Hana.
■ Build your own Hana road map. AD&D pros need to understand the full spectrum of Hana
capabilities and use cases and build a long-term vision and road map for their company that
leverages investments and provides a platform for real-time business transformation.
■ Look beyond SAP Hana for non-SAP sources. IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and Teradata
also offer in-memory database options that are viable for non-SAP sources. These
alternate solutions offer in-memory solutions to deliver high-performance analytics and
operational reporting.
Supplemental Material
Companies Interviewed For This Report
Atos
SAP
Deloitte Development
Syntel
HCL Technologies
Tech Mahindra
IBM
Under Armour
Infosys
Visy
ITC Infotech
Wipro
Molson Coors Brewing
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SAP Hana Is The Answer! What’s The Question?
Endnotes
Source: John Appleby, “Licensing, Sizing and Architecting BW on Hana,” SAP Hana and In-Memory
Computing, February 10, 2014 (http://scn.sap.com/community/Hana-in-memory/blog/2014/02/10/
licensing-sizing-and-architecting-bw-on-Hana).
1
2
Source: SAP (https://global.sap.com/campaign/ne/2013/05_cross_bw_on_Hana/index.epx?URL_ID=CRMXM13-DTB-HAN12&kNtBzmUK9zU=1#jumpform).
Refer to SAP’s online SAP Hana web pages for more examples of solutions that can run on SAP Hana.
Source: “Invent new possibilities with SAP Hana solutions,” SAP (http://www.sap.com/pc/tech/in-memorycomputing-Hana/software/overview/index.html).
3
Source: Prebuilt Applications for Your Industry, SAP (http://www.sap.com/services-support/svc/customapp-development/cnsltg/prebuilt/industry.html).
4
Actually, the original name of Hana came from Hasso’s New Architecture and was developed by the Hasse
Plattner Institute and Stanford University, starting in 2008.
5
The next-generation data platform demands that organizations invest in new technologies to help deliver
the speed, agility, and new insights critical to growing their business. Distributed in-memory data platforms
have become critical to enabling organizations to support real-time analytics, faster insights, and extreme
transaction volumes. See the October 28, 2013, “Case Study: Maple Leaf Foods Relies On SAP Hana To
Enable Faster Business Analytics” report.
6
Source: Tammy Powlas, “Newell Rubbermaid Story to Improve Sales — ASUG SAP TechEd d-code Speaker
Mohammed Siddqui,” SAP TechEd && d-code, July 16, 2014 (http://scn.sap.com/community/events/sapd-code/blog/2014/07/16/newell-rubbermaid-mobile-story-to-improve-sales--asug-sap-teched-d-codespeaker-mohammed-siddiqui).
7
Refer to SAP’s homepage for startup companies and to find more details or how to get started building your
own Hana-based applications. Source: SAP Hana (http://www.sapHana.com/community/learn/startups).
8
Source: Jordan Cao, “SAP Hana Business Application Contest,” SAP Hana, July 3, 2014 (http://www.
sapHana.com/community/blogs/blog/2014/07/03/sap-Hana-business-application-contest).
9
Source: SAP (http://marketplace.sapHana.com/hcp).
10
Source: SAP Technology (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipryxOR4WD0).
11
© 2014, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited
November 25, 2014
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