SAP marked the 1-year anniversary of the SAP HANA platform becoming generally available. To celebrate the occasion, SAP AG announced the launch of the SAP HANA Distinguished Engineer program. The new program is focused on promoting SAP HANA expertise in the market and is intended to support a new group of community-driven, hands-on HANA technical professionals.
SAP In-Memory Appliance (SAP HANA) software is a flexible, multi-purpose, data source agnostic in-memory appliance that combines SAP software components optimized on hardware provided and delivered by SAP’s hardware partners. According to SAP, key features of the appliance are real-time analytics enabling the analysis of business operations using huge volumes of detailed information while business is happening; multi-purpose, in-memory technology enabling users to instantly explore and analyze all transactional and analytical data in real time from virtually any data source; adaptable, powerful analytic models enabling users to create flexible views that expose analytic information at the speed of thought; extensive, source-agnostic data access; and enablement of real-time business insight by analyzing business operations.
Over the last year, SAP HANA has achieved customer wins and performance milestones, including more than 350 customers; 150-plus implemented projects; 16 customers with more than 10,000-times performance improvement over disk-based databases; more than 64,000 end-users; 2,000 Amazon Web Services (AWS) instances; and 1,791 trained consultants.
With the kind of adoption that HANA is experiencing, SAP needs to address the skills issue as well, Amit Sinha, vice president and technology marketing at SAP tells 5 Minute Briefing. The company has already launched certification programs which can be accomplished online or in classrooms, but that does not measure the other qualities such as a person’s ability to impact the future direction of the product, or their ability to make that knowledge widely available and accessible in the community, and have that expertise acknowledge in the community. “So, just like we are innovating on the product side, we are also innovating in how we touch customers,” says Sinha.
To foster innovation and promote technical skills, the SAP HANA Distinguished Engineer program was founded by SAP in collaboration with some of the foremost SAP HANA technologists and Mentors from Bluefin Solutions, Deloitte Consulting, IBM Global Business Solutions and independent consultants. It is open to all developers, database administrators and other SAP HANA technologists who have an interest in pursuing and promoting technical skills in support of SAP HANA-based customer solutions.
In launching this program, SAP says it is committed to fostering innovation not only in software and hardware technology, but also in the growth and development of people and skills. SAP will work closely with program members to ensure skilled technologists stay up to date with the rapid pace of development of SAP HANA. The program will also help members gain access to resources from within SAP and cross-promote their efforts to drive new solutions and best practices based on SAP HANA.
“The time is right,” says Sinha. The first year was really about the early adoption phase, he notes. “At this point in time we feel that we have proven HANA in every single vertical, including banking, automotive, healthcare, and utilities.” From here on in, it is really about market adoption and how people use it, Sinha adds. “When you go from the early adoption phase to the mass adoption phase, the key issue is skills and the ability for people to actually do what they want to do with this product, and hence the timing is very appropriate. The SAP HANA Distinguished Engineer program complements the HANA certifications that we are offering.”
More details can be found at www.experienceSAPHANA.com.