sap business suite hana

8/12/2019 SAP Business Suite Hana

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■ Monitor the success of Business Suite on Hana as both a validation of SAP's vision for in-

memory computing (IMC) and a proof point for IMC in general.

AnalysisOn 10 January 2013, SAP announced the launch of its Business Suite on Hana. SAP Customer

Relationship Management (CRM), SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Product Life Cycle

Management (PLM) and SAP Supply Chain Management (SCM) are available now with Hana as a

DBMS option. SAP plans to release Hana versions of SAP Supplier Relationship Management

(SRM) along with add-ons (such as governance, risk and compliance [GRC]) and industry solutions

in the near term. SAP did not give Gartner any specific timeline for availability of these elements,

except that it would be based on "customer demand." Gartner anticipates these products will be

delivered over the next 12 to 18 months, with the road map being driven by sales engagements.

The Hana version of Business Suite will be SAP's preferred sales option for all new customers in the

future, although again this will be subject to availability of SRM, add-ons and industry solutions.

There were no live Business Suite on Hana customers at the time of the announcement. SAP

showcased some customers at the launch event who had piloted and tested some of the

functionality; for example, Bayer Material Sciences had piloted CRM and planned to go live

sometime later in 2013. SAP stated there are between 30 to 50 customers in the current pipeline,

and any customer licensing the Business Suite on Hana will become part of the ramp-up program,

which SAP described as being "open," that is, not restricted to a specific group of customers.

However, the technology is as yet unproven in a production environment and SAP will measure the

success of the launch by quality and quantity of references over the next 12 months rather than

specific revenue or adoption goals. SAP expects adoption to be split equally between new and

existing users.

SAP claimed this announcement enables it to "reinvent" real-time business applications and thus

deliver business outcome improvements while at the same time simplifying the IT landscape. While

there are definite potential benefits from this solution, the impact on both existing and new

customers will vary. SAP positioned the transition to this new offering as being nondisruptive and,

while that may be true from a technical perspective, it may have a disruptive impact for some users

on their existing SAP investments. SAP also has to overcome delivery challenges by building the

skills in its ecosystem to support Business Suite on Hana and help clients use in-memory

technology for high-volume business applications. To aid and support adoption, SAP claims over

1,500 internal SAP consultants have been trained in addition to more than 3,000 consultants in its

partner ecosystem.

This is a major strategic announcement from SAP and the consequences of failure would be

significant. Consequently, all SAP users must consider what this announcement means for their

future investments in SAP. Figure 1 shows the impacts of this announcement on existing and

prospective SAP Business Suite users, and also what this means for the future of Hana as a

technology platform.

of 10 Gartner, Inc. | G00247476



Figure 1. Impacts and Top Recommendations for Users of SAP Business Suite on Hana

Impacts Top Recommendations

The integration of analytics with transactionprocessing in SAP Business Suite on Hanaprovides potential benefits but means manyusers must rethink their strategy for BW andanalytic applications.

• Evaluate how the new real-time analytics environmentwill change the role of BW and existing reporting/querytools.

• Organizations planning to adopt Business Suite onHana should focus investments on analyticapplications that exploit the in-memory capabilities ofHana.

The announcement of SAP Business Suiteon Hana makes Hana a DBMS deploymentoption for existing SAP users and thepreferred option for new users.

• Existing and prospective SAP users should evaluatepotential benefits and factor this into their applicationsstrategy.

• Only leading-edge adopters should consider movingto the Business Suite on Hana in the next 12 months.

Successful rollout of SAP Business Suite onHana will validate the Hana DBMS as ageneral-purpose platform, will bolster SAP’sposition as a key technology provider withcustomers, and will validate the use of in-memory technology for corporateapplications.

• Consider the Hana in-memory database part of a broaderplatform and architectural shift and only adopt it whendisaster recovery, high availability and partitioning toolsare sufficient to meet current needs.

• Monitor the success of Business Suite on Hana as both avalidation of SAP’s vision for IMC and a proof point forIMC in general.

Source: Gartner (February 2013)

Impacts and Recommendations

The announcement of SAP Business Suite on Hana makes Hana a DBMSdeployment option for existing SAP users and SAP's preferred option for new users

The main news in this announcement is that the Hana DBMS now becomes an option for the

Business Suite. It will also be SAP's preferred option for new business sales and SAP clearly

intends for it to become the preferred DBMS over time among the installed base. In order to make

this a reality, SAP has made two important decisions:

■ Although there are some new capabilities, existing functionality should work "as is" on the Hana

version of the Business Suite. Effectively, this is a database migration that should appear largely

transparent to existing users. SAP also claims that existing customizations and integrations will

migrate to the Hana version of Business Suite, although it is Gartner's opinion that integration

interfaces implemented using data integration tools that interface directly with the underlying

DBMS must be redesigned to work with Hana.

Gartner, Inc. | G00247476 of 10



■ Pricing is on the same basis as other DBMS options. Rather than requiring a Hana license

based on 64GB Hana units, the Hana DBMS is priced the same way as other DBMS options, as

a percent of the licensed SAP application value (SAV). This means new clients will not pay a

premium for the Hana version, although existing customers migrating will pay the appropriate

SAV costs for the Hana DBMS.

SAP is attempting to make the switch to Hana as straightforward as possible. An existing user will

need to be at the appropriate Enhancement Pack (EhP) level for the suite component and then

apply a Service Pack to upgrade to the Hana version of the same EhP, after which they will perform

a technical migration to Hana using SAP's Database Migration process. Not all Business Suite

components have to be migrated at the same time (for example, it is possible to migrate CRM to

Hana while still running ERP on another DBMS). New clients can install the Hana version of the EhP

directly. No upgrade of the SAP NetWeaver infrastructure (Enterprise Portal, Application Server,

Process Orchestration, etc.) is required to run the Business Suite on Hana.

Clients who had piloted CRM on Hana stated it took between two to three weeks to make the

transition. However, Gartner has not spoken to any organization that has performed or tested thismigration, so it is not yet possible to say how straightforward the process may be. Gartner

anticipates that the underlying technology changes will be widespread across the application stack,

so early adopters should allow for extensive testing as part of the move to Hana.

There are a number of potential benefits that the Business Suite on Hana offers:

■ Improved performance: Hana has the potential to improve the speed of all application

processes compared to disk-based DBMSs, while SAP has developed some Hana-specific

optimizations for memory-intensive processes like material requirements planning (MRP). Thus,

while all application areas will see some overall performance gains, the most significant benefits

will accrue from the most resource-intensive application processes. The John Deerecorporation stated at the launch of Business Suite on Hana that their pilot indicated they could

run MRP in 10 seconds instead of 6 hours. This kind of performance improvement makes it

possible to use existing application processes in new ways. For example, MRP can be used as

an interactive capability to respond to changing business conditions rather than a fixed,

overnight process.

■ Real-time analytics and transaction processing: SAP has removed the need to extract data

to a mart or repository for reporting and analytics by providing a virtual data model that allows

reporting and analytics to be performed directly on the live transaction data. This removes a

major architectural restriction of SAP Business Suite (one that is common to the majority of

enterprise application suites).

■ Reduced IT cost and complexity: SAP claims that the Hana DBMS is a simpler and more

cost-effective technology environment that is easier to manage and maintain. For example, SAP

claims Hana requires fewer database administration (DBA) resources compared with other

DBMSs. During the launch, Bayer Material Sciences stated that their pilot of CRM on Hana

indicated infrastructure costs could be around 20% lower. However, data points from live

customers are not yet available.




Consequently, it is Gartner's opinion that the Business Suite on Hana offers potential benefits to all

SAP users, but the significance and value of these benefits will vary. Organizations with the majority

of their business applications in the Business Suite footprint will gain the greatest benefits because

they will be able to leverage the combined real-time analytics/transaction processing architecture.

Gartner anticipates that larger, more complex organizations with a significant SAP footprint will see

the biggest short-term benefits and will be most likely to migrate within the next three years.

Recommendations:

■ Existing SAP users should evaluate the impact of this announcement and the potential benefits

it may deliver, and factor this into their applications strategy.

■ Users of SAP CRM, ERP and SCM should evaluate the potential benefits of the Business

Suite on Hana now, especially those experiencing performance bottlenecks in resource-

intensive functionality such as MRP, profitability analysis (CO-PA) and trade promotion

management.

■ Look for areas where this new processing power could significantly improve the

effectiveness of existing business processes. Use Gartner's Pace-Layered Application

Strategy to focus specifically on areas where these capabilities could enhance

differentiation and innovation (see "Applying Pace Layering to ERP Strategy").

■ Organizations using other components of the Business Suite, add-ons and/or industry

solutions should press SAP for a road map and evaluate the potential benefits when these

solutions become available.

■ All existing users should decide on a potential time frame for adoption of Business Suite on

Hana for strategic planning purposes. Potential time frames would be early adoption (next

12 months), adoption within two to five years, adoption no sooner than five years ordeferring for the foreseeable future. This decision should be revisited periodically as the live

customer base grows.

■ Existing users and prospective customers should only consider moving to the Business Suite

on Hana in the next 12 months if their organization is comfortable being a leading-edge adopter

of both the applications and in-memory technology.

■ Focus on system sizing, as there is no real-world experience from live production sites, and

revisit strategies for high availability and disaster recovery.

■ Skills related to the Business Suite on Hana will be in high demand for at least the next 12

months. Ensure that your service providers have the appropriately trained staff, and be

prepared to invest more in training your own staff.

■ Prospective SAP CRM, ERP, PLM and SCM customers should evaluate the Hana version

against other DBMSs.

■ Get SAP to clarify when any required add-ons and/or industry solutions will be available to

identify if these fit with your implementation schedule.




■ Focus on the potential value of real-time operational analytics, performance improvements

for complex processes and potential IT simplicity as deciding factors.

■ Consider the potential of SAP's rapid deployment solutions and the personal virtual

appliance to reduce implementation cost and complexity. These are highly preconfigured

solutions, in a range of industries, hosted in the public cloud for rapid deployment.

The integration of analytics with transaction processing in SAP Business Suite onHana provides potential benefits but means many users must rethink their strategyfor NetWeaver BW and analytic applications

The new combined real-time analytics/transaction processing architecture of the Business Suite on

Hana is a major development in the life of SAP's business applications. SAP (and other vendors)

introduced real-time transaction processing systems in the 1980s, in which business transactions

were updated in real time rather than being processed in batches (although there are still a small

number of batch processes in SAP and most other applications today). This created the vision of an

integrated, up-to-date business database, but the challenge was that the reporting and analytictools were never able to provide business users with anything approaching ease of use and insight.

The move to relational databases in the 1990s fueled the development of separate marts and

repositories with better analytic tools but at the cost of data latency: data had to be "thrown over

the wall" to, in SAP's case, NetWeaver BW.

SAP has now addressed this issue and removed this latency with the Business Suite on Hana. SAP

has developed a virtual data model that allows end-user reporting directly against the live

transaction data in the Business Suite using SAP analytics or third-party query and analysis tools

(via SQL and MDX interfaces), and also allows analytic applications to use the same transactional

data rather than working on a replicated "shadow" database. SAP has delivered some key

additional capabilities with the Business Suite on Hana:

■ Hana Analytics Foundation for SAP Business Suite: This is delivered with SAP Hana as an

additional solution. For customers moving to the Business Suite on Hana, it delivers the virtual

data model schemas for the Business Suite components plus the SAP Hana Analytics

Foundation Browser. This is an HTML5-based Web application that allows users to browse the

virtual data model using both hierarchical tree views and search, and can also be used to build

Excel reports.

■ A new range of real time analytic "cockpits" that deliver role-based information to

business users: These will be rolled out over the next 12 to 18 months.

These capabilities will be key to the success of the Business Suite on Hana. If the combination ofthe Hana Analytics Foundation and cockpits deliver a compelling and easy-to-use experience for

business users without requiring significant IT support, most existing SAP users will see significant

value in such an offering. Therefore, any organization considering the Business Suite on Hana

should evaluate these capabilities closely against existing offerings from SAP and third parties.

However, this approach raises issues for business intelligence (BI) and application strategists. First,

the real-time vision is currently very SAP-centric and focused on the Business Suite. Although Hana

can access other data sources without replicating data, doing so will introduce a degree of latency




and complexity, and Gartner is not aware of any examples of live clients doing this. Second, this

architectural shift means that the role of BW and other SAP analytic capabilities may change

significantly for some existing SAP users. For example, many SAP users have implemented BW to

provide better quality operational reporting against the Business Suite. However, BW is potentially

no longer needed for operational reporting with the Business Suite on Hana, although if users need

to combine SAP and non-SAP data for analytical purposes they may still want to merge them in a

data mart/warehouse (which could be BW or a third-party product). Consequently, this could cause

some existing users to rethink the role of BW in their future BI strategy, especially those users

primarily using BW for operational reporting from the SAP Business Suite.

Over time, the combination of real-time transaction processing and analytics may simplify the IT

landscape because the in-memory capabilities support both online transaction processing (OLTP)

and analytic use cases in a single infrastructure. However, in the short and midterm this change

adds potential complexity to SAP's BI and analytics road map (see "SWOT: SAP's Business

Intelligence and Analytics Platform, Worldwide") because the availability of the Business Suite on

Hana will change the potential value of some components in this portfolio. For example, SAP has

already released a number of analytic applications that exploit the in-memory capabilities of Hana

and that have similar use cases to other SAP analytic applications (for example, sales and

operations planning). These "Hana native" analytic applications are more likely to complement the

real-time analytics environment and may offer capabilities that analytic applications using other

databases cannot.

Recommendations:

■ Existing BW users need to evaluate how the real-time analytics environment, the virtual data

model, the SAP Hana Analytics Foundation and the new cockpits will impact their use of BW

and existing reporting/query tools.

■ Any organization planning to move to the Business Suite on Hana that has the majority of

its enterprise data in SAP should review the role BW will play in its BI strategy, and how any

changes in role will impact future investments in BW.

■ Ensure BI strategists work with business users to identify which current reports and

analytics can be replaced by the Hana Analytics Foundation and associated analytics.

■ Organizations planning to adopt the Business Suite on Hana should focus investments on

analytic applications that exploit the in-memory capabilities of Hana, as these will most likely

complement the real-time analytics architecture of the Business Suite on Hana.

A successful rollout of SAP Business Suite on Hana will validate the Hana DBMS asa general-purpose platform, will bolster SAP's position as a key technology providerwith customers, and will validate the use of in-memory technology for corporateapplications

SAP's delivery of the Business Suite on Hana is a major milestone in the company's pursuit of a

larger role as a provider of technology, not just applications. Since the introduction of NetWeaver in

2004, SAP has established itself as a credible provider in some areas of application infrastructure




technology (such as integration), but most of the deployments of the NetWeaver technology are still

closely associated with SAP's business applications. The Hana technology creates a new

opportunity for SAP to differentiate its technology by enabling new deployment and operational

models. It also positions SAP as an innovator and an industry leader beyond its familiar space of

business applications.

The SAP Hana DBMS has gained traction in the market, but so far use has been limited to that of a

technology enabler for specific analytical applications rather than a technology platform for a wide

range of use cases. This is partly due to the lack of trust in the new, only partially proven IMC

approach (see "Innovation Insight: Invest in In-Memory Computing for Breakthrough Competitive

Advantage").

The Business Suite on Hana is the most significant proof point for SAP's new technological

approach. If this product gains widespread acceptance, it will be a validation that the Hana

architecture (which is a broader set of technologies than just the Hana database, see "SAP Throws

Down the Next-Generation Architecture Gauntlet With Hana") can be a platform for high- volume

transaction processing, not just special-purpose analytics. It will also validate IMC as a technologyfor mission-critical business applications, and bring SAP in direct competition with IBM, Microsoft

and Oracle in the large DBMS market.

To be successful, SAP and its ecosystem will have to provide infrastructure capabilities that have

not been present in earlier Hana releases, such as disaster recovery and high availability and

localized data partitioning.

Recommendations:

■ Organizations interested in SAP Hana DBMS technology for large scale, business-critical

deployments should adopt Hana when disaster recovery, high availability and partitioning toolsare sufficient to meet current needs.

■ Organizations considering the adoption of IMC should monitor the success of Business Suite

on Hana as both a validation of SAP's vision for IMC, and also as a proof point for IMC in

general.

■ Organizations considering the Business Suite on Hana should consider the in-memory database

part of a broader platform and architectural shift that can leverage in-memory data grids,

complex-event processing, stream processing and in-memory analytics to deliver new

application experiences (see "Taxonomy, Definitions and Vendor Landscape for In-Memory

Computing Technologies").

Recommended ReadingSome documents may not be available as part of your current Gartner subscription.

"What CIOs Need to Know About In-Memory Database Management Systems"

"SWOT: SAP's Business Intelligence and Analytics Platform, Worldwide"




"Applying Pace Layering to ERP Strategy"

"Innovation Insight: Invest in In-Memory Computing for Breakthrough Competitive Advantage"

"SAP Throws Down the Next-Generation Architecture Gauntlet With Hana"

"Taxonomy, Definitions and Vendor Landscape for In-Memory Computing Technologies"




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