UPDATED 13:40 EDT / NOVEMBER 28 2011

NEWS

SAP Eyes Database Dominance with Pure In-Memory Approach

As if there was any doubt after the messaging onslaught at this year’s SAPPHIRE and TechEd conferences, a senior executive in SAP’s business analytics division tells Wikibon that the company is going all-in on in-memory storage architecture and not looking back.

“We made a bet,” said SAP’s Steve Lucas, referring to the company’s initiative to migrate its entire application portfolio on top of SAP’s new in-memory database HANA, “and we think that bet is paying off.”

SAP HANA is an in-memory computing appliance that combines SAP database software with pre-tuned server, storage, and networking hardware from one of several SAP hardware partners. It is designed to support real-time analytic and transactional processing.

HANA’s in-memory architecture currently allows SAP analytic applications near real-time access to terabytes of transactional and operational data for significantly faster query times, said Lucas, Global GM of Business Analytics and Technology. SAP Co-Pa users can, for example, perform profitability analysis in minutes instead of weeks thanks to HANA, he said.

SAP is counting on HANA to modernize both its application portfolio and its corporate image as a stodgy, 20th century enterprise software company. Said Lucas: “We are dead serious about winning the database market. Period.”

Early signs are positive. Lucas said the HANA pipeline is the biggest in SAP’s history, and Co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe stated publicly earlier this year, which Lucas referenced in an interview with Wikibon analysts, that the company will do over 100 million Euros in HANA sales by the end of 2011. Services providers are also taking notice. Capgemini, for one, earlier this month launched a new practice specifically to help clients deploy and manage HANA.

(Watch SAP’s Snabe, recorded live inside theCUBE at SAPPHIRE in May 2011, discuss the complexity and cost implications of in-memory computing.)

While SAP’s hardware partners leverage solid state drives for HANA back-up and recovery, the company believes a pure in-memory data storage approach will give SAP a cost advantage over competitors that take a hybrid disk-based/in-memory tack to exposing data to end-user applications, according to Lucas.

If the price-to-performance ratio of in-memory storage continues to rise and SAP delivers on its promise to migrate transactional and ERP systems on top of HANA, the company might do just that. But, as Wikibon’s storage expert David Floyer points out, it is far from clear if hybrid approaches, such as those used by consumer devices like Apple’s iPad, won’t increasingly make their way to the enterprise.

For now, SAP is definitely moving in the right direction. Most notably, it recently announced that HANA now supports NetWeaver Business Warehouse. This means all of SAP’s 16,000 customers now have the option to migrate off competing databases (read: Oracle and IBM DB2) and onto HANA. If such a migration occurs en masse, it’ll be validation for SAP and a drain on Oracle/IBM.

But SAP needs to do more to win its big bet on in-memory, and Lucas acknowledged as much. Specifically, Lucas said SAP must create a robust programming environment so developers of all stripes can build apps on HANA; Prove to a skeptical market that SAP HANA is just as reliable and robust as stalwart databases like Oracle and DB2; And, as mentioned, must move to slide HANA under transactional systems to support its bread-and-butter ERP platform.

SAP is working on all three initiatives, Lucas said. ExperienceSAPHANA.com, while still in beta, allows developers access to cloud-based HANA sandboxes to experiment with the platform. The company is also ramping up its messaging efforts to confront the inevitable marketing backlash from the big incumbent database vendors. As for the most important of the three — migrating SAP ERP deployments to HANA – Lucas couldn’t say when that will happen.

As for Hadoop, Lucas said SAP plans to make it easier to migrate data from Hadoop clusters to HANA (“Right now it’s not as smooth as I’d like it to be,”), but that HANA fills some fundamental gaps in the open source Big Data framework. Specifically, Lucas said SAP sees Hadoop as a good platform for storing petabytes of data, but HANA turns that data into terabytes of information.

The implication is that the Hadoop’s application layer isn’t up to the task of delivering insights to end-users. For the moment, Lucas is correct. But, as evident at this month’s Hadoop World conference in New York City, there’s a bevy of exciting and well-funded start-ups working on Hadoop-based application development platforms and business intelligence applications that SAP will soon need to contend with.

I’ve written an in-depth analysis of HANA from here if you’re looking for all the technical details behind the platform. Finding SAP HANA customers is no easy task, so if you’re using HANA please drop me a line or comment below to let us know your experiences with the platform.


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