SAPphire Now 2013 kicks off tomorrow – we’ll be live-streaming the event from theCUBE, featuring exclusive interviews with some of the industry’s top executives.  We expect to gain some perspective on virtualization and managing mission-critical apps in the datacenter,  but before going to this year’s event, let’s take some time to review what happened last year.

2012 was big for HANA.  What is HANA?  It isn’t an acronym for Hasso’s New Architecture, pertaining to Hasso Plattner, SAP’s founder, nor does it stand for High Performance ANalytic Appliance.  HANA is just…HANA.  It is SAP AG’s implementation of in-memory database technology, and is the synthesis of three technologies: the search engine TREX,  the in-memory, light-weight, online transaction processing (OLTP) RDBMS technology with row-based data store P*Time, which came from the acquisition of  Transact in Memory, Inc. by SAP in 2005, and MaxDB, which came from the collaboration of MySQL AB and SAP.

Before last year’s event, SAP announced a set of mobile applications designed for enterprise use: Learning Assistant aims to speed up worker training, along with several banking and online payment apps partially based on technology from Sybase.

SAP also announced its partnership with Opera Solutions to encourage the use of Opera’s Signal Hub tech in combination with SAP’s in-memory analytics appliance.  Signal Hub is Opera’s approach to passing a large data set through a filter to make it easier to extract valuable information.  The SAP and Opera agreement is poised to produce a HANA-optimized variation of the solution.

Though the main focus of last year’s SAPphire Now was HANA, SAP also made it known that it is becoming a cloud company, making an effort to appeal to the developer community, and is now striving to deliver a unified experience to its customers.

SAP also sees the importance of social networking.  Dinesh Sharma, VP of SAP Cloud Marketing, stating that, “We’re thinking of social as being embedded in absolutely every application from now on…we won’t be releasing anything that doesn’t have social capabilities from the get go,” during an interview with theCube.

So how would this year’s event compare to last year’s?  Will HANA still be taking the prime spot?  Has SAP’s cloud efforts expanded?  And is SAP now more developer friendly and social?  We’ll soon find out what SAP has in its future.