Great news about HANA!

"SAP has realised that it needs to shift its strategy and their priorities," analyst Josh Greenbaum of Enterprise Applications Consulting told CMSWire, adding that HANA is no longer a differentiator in the enterprise marketplace.

One part of the problem is the architecture of HANA itself, according to Mathias Golombek, CTO of database firm Exasol. An amalgam of three separate acquisitions (TREX, MaxDB and P*TIME), HANA was hurried out amid great marketing fanfare as a general-purpose database to displace Oracle, he said. However, while it is appropriate for many use cases it fails to scale to big-data type scenarios and its mixed heritage makes it difficult to maintain and optimise.

Angela Eager, research director enterprise software and application services at analyst firm TechMarketView, agreed that SAP's former strategy has come to the end of the road. "With so many multi-modal databases in the market it is hard for a supplier to stand out and SAP's strengths have been applications and business processes," she said.

https://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/analysis/3074393/why-sap-seems-to-be-sidelining-hana

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Basically our customers hate HANA and are resisting adoption. It’s just too expensive for minimal benefit.

SAP was doing way better before HANA, so agree with the posting here:

https://www.thelayoff.com/t/YJfI85O

"instead of the traditional concept of saving resources and limiting data to disk."

Stuff like this is repeated often but still wrong, another myth created by SAP marketing. 15 years ago a usual enterprise database like Oracle fetched 95% of all data from its memory in a typical ERP scenario. This is an important reason why it is hard for HANA to perform better than its competitors in OLTP applications.

HANA was created to solve a problem for SAP not for customers.

SAP wanted to remove IBM and Oracle from BW accounts.

Thousands of BW customers used HANA with BW between 2010 and 2015.

Then SAP decided to do the same for ERP accounts.

Problem is that HANA was designed as an in-memory column store for OLAP workloads.

Changing this to fit mainstream OLTP requirements is like changing an engine on a plane in mid flight.

SAP can't ditch BW customers because they are the biggest and most influential customers mainly in Europe. At the same time, the adoption of S/4 depends on making HANA a mainstream OLTP row-store product with comparable capability to DB2, Oracle, and Microsoft. That is a Herculean endeavor. Add the nefarious cost of the HANA hardware and the high cost of HANA consultants and you can see why SAP will keep struggling.

All fair points, but SAP will not become DB agnostic again. Its basically a monopoly. SAP got the head-start it needed to displace DB2, MS and Oracle DB's from the SAP Landscape and they had to play catch-up to get their own products released. (After Larry Ellison claiming SAP insane to even attempt an in-mem DB in 2013) SAP now has its own data platform offering that is not necessarily superior to those companies, but can contend in the same arena. Not bad for a company that only wrote business apps at some point.

Fair enough , they need to drop the licensing cost. But the whole point of In-Mem is to throw massive amounts of hardware at it, irrespective of the vendor, as good in-mem databases knows how to use the latest hardware (CPU and Memory) to the max, for faster results, instead of the traditional concept of saving resources and limiting data to disk.

Not to mention that lower cost easier to implement options exist now with Microsoft in memory database included at no extra cost.

No mention of the ungodly cost of hardware and licensing? Surely that was the real issue for HANA adoption. HANA needs 25x the hardware resources a traditional DB needs and 100x the cost.

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Great news about HANA!

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