John Appleby, Global Head of SAP Hana at Bluefin, and Christoph Roman Streubert, Senior SAP Infrastructure Architect at EMC, visited theCube during Sapphire Now 2013 to share their perspectives on SAP HANA with host John Furrier.

John Furrier lead off the discussion by asking what the most common misconception they’ve seen would be, regarding HANA. Appleby stated that, though there are plenty of misconceptions, one of the biggest would be that HAHA isn’t a database, it’s just a tool to make business move faster. “People will say it’s not a database. The reality is that HANA is a complete platform of application services for database. It’s the end-to-end, it keeps your information safe, secure, and it makes it fast.”

Appleby went on to say that another misconception he sees is that HANA isn’t enterprise-ready. “For me, the remainder of the enterprise stuff is done now—high availability, disaster recovery. Sometimes people say these things don’t exist, but now I think it’s really a full suite.” He also emphasized that HANA presents opportunities, such as enabling you to back up from your disaster recover node, that should be very appealing to companies.

Streubert delivered his insight on how HANA is working to change the market’s perspective on SAP. “I like [HANA’s] use cases on the side that SAP calls ‘the art of the possible,’ outside the norm.” He referenced the online game company, Bigpoint, who don’t use ERP internally, and are, generally, not the typical SAP customer. However, they are using HANA to accomplish new things with their business that they weren’t able to before. Streubert commented that he appreciates and is on the look out for use cases such as these.

“Most organizations that have run SAP for a while, they don’t think of SAP as a hot company that can provide something to unlock new business possibilities,” Streubert explained. “Typically it’s running financials, running HR, that kind of stuff that’s essential, but boring.” Proving to companies that SAP can deliver tools for business innovation can be a challenge, but HANA is gearing up to break down those walls.

See the full segment below: