SAP HANA gut check. In the run up to SAP TechEd Las Vegas there are three major themes we can expect to hear a LOT about: HANA - SAP's pitch for high speed, in-memory analytics and applicationsMobile - some of us have been privileged to see some pretty spiffy demos of new applications with plenty of iPad love thrown in.Analytics - activists in the BI space have been moaning about delays to GA for BI4. SAP hopes to shut them up. For this post, it is HANA that intrigues me. According to Bill McDermott, SAP's co-CEO, this represents one of the fastest growing pipelines in the company's history. He has consistently said at each of the last few financial analyst calls - and in between - that HANA's pipeline is running at €10 million ($14.5 million) a week. Last week I heard that mobile represents a $0.5 billion pipeline. Software SNAFUs Most of those I speak with believe SAP is betting much of its future on HANA - period.
To its credit, SAP is responding as quickly as possible and at the highest levels. Vijay's thoughts on all things big and small. I am going to Madrid next week to attend SAPPHIRENOW. SAP is paying for my flight, hotel and admission. As I am preparing for the trip, I thought I will share the questions I am looking to get answers. My understanding at the moment is that HANA will bring in 100M Euros this year. It is quite impressive for a 1.0 product, and SAP deserves kudos for getting customers to buy HANA in a bad economy. So, here are my questions.
I am hoping to get them all answered next week in person, or if I am lucky someone can enlighten me in blog comments here itself. Customer Perspective 1. 2. 3. 4. Applications Perspective 1. 2. 3. 4. Partner Perspective 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Cloud Perspective 1. 2. 3. 4. Future Perspective 1. For the big customers – they will have long term existing licenses from ORCL etc for enterprise which might not be easy to get out of in near future.
For smaller customers – the majority – how much of a pain is BW really? 2. 3. 4. Like this: Like Loading... Jim Snabe, co-CEO SAP explains current business drivers. The enterprise market has seen a succession of strong quarters. IBM delivered a strong Q2 and uplifted its full year outlook. Yesterday, SAP did the same. Although not exactly comparable, Oracle posted a strong finish to its financial year. Just how good was SAP's last set of results and what's going on? Morgan Stanley's Adam Wood said in a research note: "The fact 2Q was driven by the core business is another clear positive as HANA / Mobile are still to contribute. " On a call today with Jim Hagemann Snabe, co-CEO SAP, he said that current sales are being driven by a value based approach to core offerings where the company is helping customers get more out of their SAP investments via an easier consumption model.
He reiterated an earlier conversation where he noted that companies spend 85% of their IT investments on keeping existing applications going. SAP has relentlessly talked up HANA the last six months. Business ByDesign is not making any appreciable impact on the top line. Vijay's thoughts on all things big and small. SAP had a great quarter – and deserves kudos for that. Not a surprise either that maintenance revenue is the big contributor. Despite what analysts say about disruption and other such stuff – when you have a stable and committed install base, they are not going anywhere in a hurry. So SAP can take reasonable time to get new revenue streams. However it is not a permanent hall pass, and investors will become annoyed quickly if EPS drops. So they have these three opportunities to make new money – HANA, Mobility and On-demand. HANA is the biggest name from a pure marketing POV – SAP is shouting from the roof tops that HANA is awesome.
So then what happens when HANA moves under BW as its database? Moving on to On Demand – they have two things at play. However, LOB on demand solutions I think is a money shot. However, on flip side there are two big issues. And then there is mobility – which should be the easiest place for SAP to make money., given the growing market. Like this: Like Loading... SAP rolls out new in-memory applications for HANA | Business Intelligence. The family of specialized applications for SAP's HANA (High-Performance Analytic Appliance) in-memory computing engine is growing, with a new application that allows utilities to crunch information from smart meters, and another that companies can use to run sophisticated profitability analyses on financial data, SAP said Tuesday at the Tech Ed conference in Las Vegas.
HANA, which was first announced last year, is available in appliance form on hardware from a number of vendors. Built in part upon existing products at SAP, HANA places data to be processed in RAM, versus reading it off disks, which provides a performance boost. [ Discover what's new in business applications with InfoWorld's Technology: Applications newsletter. | Get the latest insight on the tech news that matters from InfoWorld's Tech Watch blog. ] SAP had previously released a Strategic Workforce Planning application for HANA, which allows companies to analyze the effect of changes to their employee base. SAP’s Hana Analytics May Pay Off as Software Trumps Hardware. SAP AG (SAP), the German software maker whose sales outpaced those of Oracle Corp. (ORCL) last quarter for the first time in 2 1/2 years, has a new weapon to defend its decision not to add hardware to its mainstay business. At the heart of the newly found momentum is SAP’s Hana offering, which allows clients including BASF SE and Colgate- Palmolive Co. to speed up the analysis of business data.
The amount of prospective sales for Hana is “very, very large and growing very, very quickly,” Chief Technology Officer Vishal Sikka said in an interview. “We have never seen anything of this kind of growth before.” The 400 million-euro ($571 million) pipeline for Hana, which was officially released in June, is the biggest in the history of Walldorf, Germany-based SAP, the largest maker of business-management software. Hana, which stands for High-Performance Analytic Appliance, fits SAP’s strategy to focus on developing its own software without adding hardware offerings through acquisitions. Close. SAP's HANA roadmap: does it convince? Yesterday, SAP announced what it called a roadmap for HANA. HANA is SAP's take on the idea of in-memory technology for enterprise applications. In reality, the announcement was a selection of planned applications scheduled for release later this year. That's not a roadmap.
It's a statement of intent. Those familiar with the Big Enterprise ERP World will be used to 12-18 month product announcement cycles followed be a period of silence while SAP (Oracle is no different) developers destruction test every possible use case they can imagine. During the executive Q&A, Vishal Sikka, SAP executive board member rattled off a list of applications SAP expects to deliver by Q4 2011. A cursory look will tell you that SAP is going deep and wide on a bunch of applications that offer the potential for delivering both horizontal and vertical market business value.
As I completed the question, anticipating that Q4 means 2012...sometime...I saw a broad grin spread across Vishal's face. SAP's HANA is hot, but still needs to mature | Applications. The potential of SAP's HANA in-memory computing engine permeated the agenda and had attendees' tongues wagging this week at the Tech Ed conference in Las Vegas, but the technology still has some maturing to do. SAP has relentlessly promoted HANA since its launch in May 2010, touting its ability to quickly analyze large amounts of business data and reporting major early interest from customers.
Over time, SAP plans to weave HANA throughout its portfolio as part of a sweeping "renewal," but in reality, the product only went into general availability in June, and detailed stories of customers successfully using it in production have so far been scarce. [ Discover what's new in business applications with InfoWorld's Technology: Applications newsletter. | Get the latest insight on the tech news that matters from InfoWorld's Tech Watch blog. ] Customers should take pains to line up a full-fledged, dedicated HANA team, according to Reiter. SAP Q1 2011. Some thoughts.