SAP Kicks off HANA Era for SAP Business Suite

Heralding what SAP refers to as a new in-memory computing era for running SAP ERP applications, SAP executives today announced that the company’s flagship Business Suite of ERP applications is now available on the SAP High Performance Analytics Appliance (HANA) database platform.

According to SAP Co-founder and Chairman of the SAP Supervisory Board Hasso Plattner, the arrival of SAP Business Suite on HANA marks the culmination of a six-year effort to move the company’s core ERP application software to an in-memory computing platform.

The implications of that move, says Plattner, span everything from reducing the amount of physical space required to run ERP applications by eliminating the need for “rusty spinning disks” to re-engineering business processes in an age where batch processing will no longer be required because all application code is processed in a real-time database.

Other significant implications include the ability to instantly generate reports directly against on-line transaction processing (OLTP) data without having to first pre-process data using a separate data warehouse platform, and 10 to 1,000 improvements in analytic application such as planning and forecasting running directly on top of HANA.

Ultimately, Plattner says that the advent of SAP Business Suite on HANA will lead to the re-engineering of almost every business process to take advantage of real-time processing of data on top of HANA.

One of the first adopters of SAP Business Suite on HANA is Deere and Company, which Derek Dyer, director of global SAP services for Deere, says is now, among other things, closing its financials in minutes versus days and weeks. Other benefits include simplification of the IT stack that Deere needs to manage while simultaneously being able to more easily work with massive amounts of Big Data being generated in real time by thousands of sensors, says Dyer. Ultimately, Dyer says Deere will explore extending the benefits of real-time processing and analytics capabilities out to customers, business partners and suppliers.

While SAP has been aggressively promoting adoption of HANA for the last two years, the applications previously available consisted of data warehouse and analytics applications. SAP Business Suite represents the deployment of a major OLTP application on HANA that consists of trillions of lines of code, which should have far-reaching implications that span everything from the way IT is managed to the way data will be consumed throughout the organization.