“HANA enables these developers to be incredibly efficient inside the organization by writing the right paradigm that they want, but only having one database to manage,” says Chris Hallenbeck, Data Warehouse Architect, SAP.  Stopping by theCube to talk with Furrier and Vellante at Strata 2013, Hallenbeck made no bones about the innovation SAP has in Big Data (full video below).

The interesting takeaway about SAP’s strategy when it comes to Big Data is its very assertive effort to lead by example, not hype.  HANA, SAP’s speedy, in-memory computing platform positions itself as the gold standard for real-time Big Data analytics. “Hana can take data that’s accessed relationally, and make it available multi-dimensionally with just the meta data layer to do that. We don’t make a copy of it, so now I’m getting the same access feeds as a multi-dimensional database.” In Lehman’s terms: one system that solves the problems of multiple databases.

When asked to comment on SAP’s policy on opening up HANA to other no SQL databases, Hallenbeck had this to say, “Our’s is to embrace other databases. We opened up our API’s to third parties that are directly competing on our BI lawyer. I’m working directly with a lot of independent software vendors (ISV’s) to port their applications to HANA that make exact copies like competitive products as our own.” Historically speaking, this is what SAP has done too.

To the surprise of no one, Hallenbeck spoke about how SAP and Intel are continuing their partnerships on a lot of fronts. SAP has chosen Intel as a dance partner. By bringing combing the toolset that each has, you net one simple goal: power and speed with grunt work. HANA allows you to have the power and speed of real-time Big Data analysis. Intel’s toolset within Hadoop allows you to collect lower-value density data or massive other data you want to archive.

SAP HANA’s in-memory play will continue to be the gold standard in real-time Big Data analytics. Before he left, Furrier asked him for a teaser about SAP’s Sapphire event later this year: the big question is, what is this real-time data platform? How are you going to bring all of these together? What he was able to tell us: here are the things we’ve delivered, here is the roadmap, and how it all comes together along with third party systems and databases in an ecosystem (see Hallenbeck’s full run down in the video below).

I don’t know about you, but I’m excited for Sapphire this year. I’m equally excited to see how SAP continues to innovate in the Big Data space. They serve as a good reminder: be all walk, less talk.