HANA’s in-memory analytics platform is expected  to be a hot topic at SAP’s Sapphire Now event, now that it’s had a full year to test the market.

Just short of a year ago Fujitsu became one of the first major hardware vendors to adopt HANA across a very large portion of its portfolio, stretching servers, storage and networking equipment.   At the same time Hewlett-Packard announced that the ProLiant DL980 G7 and HP ProLiant DL580 G7 servers had been certified to run the analytics platform as well.

It was then HANA began a rapid expansion, Cisco became the next major vendor to offer HANA with its Unified Computing Systems to top clients in Southern Asia, preceding SAP’s own global expansion, which kicked off a few weeks later.

Word HANA had been made available to international customers and channel partners emerged alongside what was, at the time, a fresh investment in the Indian market. “General availability is a major milestone for SAP HANA, but this is just the beginning,” said Dr. Vishal Sikka, executive board member, Technology and Innovation, SAP AG.

“SAP HANA brings a fundamental transformation to the way companies run their businesses and is at the heart of innovation across our entire product and technology portfolio at SAP.”

SAP expanded on this approach at TechEd 2011, the Sapphire follow-up event  the German business software maker holds in Bangalore. There, we learned of a new cloud-based solution with HANA at its core – SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) OnDemand.

Expectations are high for HANA at Sapphire this year, as SAP defines its strategy around the analytics platform and justifies its other related investments, including the acquisition of SuccessFactors.

We’re looking to see how HANA can be applied across a few different sectors, including the intersection of cloud and mobile, social and analytics.  We’ll be looking to hear from HANA customers, partners and SAP, addressing questions around HANA’s implementation so far, and how it’s impacted the market.

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