The Best Sap Hana Industry News

Oct. 24, 2012 - PRLog -- Of itself, HANA is nothing more than a container into which you put 'stuff' and then execute at high speed. The speed at which you can execute depends on many factors but in analytical applications, it is not uncommon to see orders of magnitude process time improvement. Once early adopters got over the speed shock, they quickly settled into 'so what?' mode. SAP is now at an inflection point where it has to figure out what to do with HANA beyond speeds and feeds. The obvious target is extreme applications but where do those come from?

I asked Plattner whether he sees HANA and its implications as reflective of the early start up days of SAP. The surprising (to me) answer was 'no.' "HANA requires discipline and order so no, it cannot be like those days." But then he revealed something which provides important insight into the reasoning behind the free dev license.

SAP can discount 99.5% of those two million. They're rooted in the ABAP world of SAP R/3 and the Business Suite and will be for years to come. According to Plattner, the company is finding it challenging to get its internal army of ABAP developers to make the switch. "They ask, why should we change when things work just fine and are stable in ABAP?" says Plattner. It is a reasonable position given that enterprise applications and especially ERP are considered business critical. But that misses the point of HANA.

In the very early days of R/2, SAP was inside the companies it served. It acquired tremendous domain knowledge over a period of some 20 years. With the release of R/3 in the 1992/93 time frame, the emphasis shifted to one where SAP developed independently of its customers. Over time, that domain knowledge was lost. That explains why, even though SAP serves 23 industries, its R/3-Business Suite footprint is relatively small - maybe 30% of all requirements. By making HANA developer licensing free, SAP opens up the spigot to building domain specific applications that in many cases will only have a small number of customers.

In those cases where it is possible to generalist, the company will win handsomely, either because it has found a blockbuster or its partners have developed a blockbuster against which SAP can sell HANA deployment licenses. A great example is the working capital dashboard from IBM. SAP may even win in those cases where it co-innovates with customers in the building of extreme applications where the customer is prepared to put versions of its own build into the market. It's a bit like Honda selling engines to many auto makers.

Outside of generic databases, enterprise companies like SAP offered almost nothing for developers looking to build great apps that could be monetized. Apple got all the attention and rightly so. By unlocking the developer license, SAP is one more step towards becoming a developer ecosystem gravity center. There is much still to do, but as Aiaz Kazi head of SAP platform marketing said to me:  "Free is a four letter word for HANA developers...come one, come all."

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