Rumors that SAP is restricting HANA to BW and certifying S4 on AnyDB.

I keep hearing rumors that SAP is about to announce they will certify S4 on Oracle and IBM databases.

The feedback from SAP services and partners is that migrations are way too complex and expensive because of HANA architecture and that finally SAP realized that combining OLAP and OLTP in the same engine was a mistake.

The primary goal of HANA was to displace Oracle underneath SAP BW but what they did wrong was going into the standalone OLTP database market. SAP has been unable to refactor HANA to suit these use cases because thousands of BW customers were already reliant on it and it would be very hard to make the changes backward-compatible.

What's more is that the market was already starting to move away from the idea of an all-purpose database, towards using multiple databases each optimised for a particular purpose. Also, with so many multi-modal databases in the market it is hard for a supplier to stand out.

The restructuring around HANA and ABAP coupled with work around SCP and Cloud Foundry technologies suggest that SAP is opening up to alternate databases and open source platforms as its future strategy. In short, SAP will start reducing emphasis on HANA by hiding it underneath BW.

What does this all mean? More layoffs in HANA teams?

Comment! It's anonymous!

7 replies (most recent on top)

@3slr "SAP has put massive resources into optimizing code-line for HANA and to get away from AnyDB, this would mean 2 billion lines of re-coding"

This re-coding is a myth that was created by Hasso Plattner 2015 when S/4HANA was announced. Replacing ABAP code that aggregates data with database views should not be called re-coding but "refactoring" or "dismantling of legacy code to make use of database features of the 1990s".

It would be uneconomical to re-code ERP business logic on the same inefficient ABAP platform.

S4HANA becomes S4AnyDB? Preposterous. SAP has put massive resources into optimizing code-line for HANA and to get away from AnyDB, this would mean 2 billion lines of re-coding and massive manpower, marketing and PR would have been for naught.

This probably won't happen, but it is wrong that it can't happen. The so called "code push down" is mostly usage of aggregate views in form of CDS views that to some extent also exist on ECC on AnyDb (since every database is capable of aggregate views), and this extent is sufficient for most "simplifications" and of course extendable.

More likely there will be a (compared to S/4HANA) restricted AnyDb version of ERP beyond 2025 and the "premium version" S/4HANA.

This is nonsense and cant happen. S4 relies on HANA for the simplification parts, especially with the finance programs being pushed down to the HANA DB and can no longer claim to be "real time" on any other DB, even though everyone now knows HANA is not real time.

S4 without HANA is just Netweaver an admission of failure.

They also have to get away from scale out BW on HANA, what a disaster scale out HANA is.

If it is true, a good news

If this is true - it would be major egg on SAP and Hasso's face. I cant imagine this is true.

Thread regarding SAP layoffs

Rumors that SAP is restricting HANA to BW and certifying S4 on AnyDB.

7 replies (most recent on top)

Post a reply