SAP showcased HANA’s winning qualities in a webcast in which the company made four key announcements designed to put a fine point on SAP’s strategy which focuses heavily on HANA and cloud: new and enhanced offerings for the SAP HANA Cloud Platform, the SAP HANA Marketplace, HANA’s new pricing, and additional innovations on top of HANA. The company also announced that HANA had broken the Guinness World Record for the largest data warehouse ever built – 12.1 petabytes.
Jonathan Becher, chief marketing officer of SAP, emphasized that the SAP strategy can be explained in one phrase – SAP Cloud Powered by SAP HANA. The first part means that all SAP applications from SAP will be in the cloud – and everything from SAP will be cloud-available. This includes how you find it, buy it, pay for it, or what the cloud marketplace would call the consumption model, said Becher. He said the second part of the strategy, Powered by SAP HANA, means that HANA is the single unifying platform underneath everything that SAP does. “Underneath all of our applications, but of course not just our applications, but everybody’s applications,” he said. “This means that customers can buy a single application but be confident that as they get other applications over time they will all work seamlessly together.”
Becher was joined by Vishal Sikka, member of the Executive Board of SAP AG, Products & Innovation, who explained the key announcements.
New Offerings for HANA Cloud Platform
SAP announced new offerings for SAP HANA Cloud Platform. Customers now have the ability to choose from three offerings: SAP HANA AppServices, SAP HANA DBServices, and SAP HANA Infrastructure Services.
The platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offers in memory-centric infrastructure, database and application services to build, extend, deploy and run applications. SAP HANA Cloud Platform is available via SAP HANA Marketplace, and according to SAP, customers can access SAP HANA and quickly gain the benefit of a unified platform service for next-gen apps, and buy, deploy and run with the flexibility of a subscription contract.
Users can sign up for the SAP HANA cloud platform in few minutes and start to build and deploy an application, said Sikka. There are now more than 25,000 developers building on the HANA Cloud Platform. In one integrated platform, developers have everything they need to build and deploy an applications - infrastructure, database and applications.
SAP HANA Marketplace Offers Easier Purchasing Experience
The new SAP HANA Cloud Platform offerings are available for a simplified trial and purchase experience in sizes ranging from 128 GB to 1 TB of memory on SAP HANA Marketplace, an online store that lets customers learn, try, and buy applications powered by SAP HANA. SAP Fiori apps and hundreds of startups and ISVs offerings are also available on the site. “A marketplace for the world that we are coming into is an essential part of how we sell,” said Sikka.
New Pricing and Consumption Model for HANA
SAP also unveiled new pricing options for SAP HANA intended to broaden the reach of the platform and make it more easily accessible to everyone starting with a base price with add-on options available as desired. Customers buy through a consumption model and can either implement end-to-end platform use cases or choose additional options as needed such as predictive analytics, spatial processing and planning. This, says SAP, will increase the opportunities to get started with HANA and provide customers with the ability to innovate.
SAP HANA Innovation Breakthrough with SAP Genomic Analyzer
Underscoring the types of applications that are possible with HANA, SAP also announced the SAP Genomic Analyzer, a new application powered by SAP HANA that aims to allow researchers and clinicians to find breakthrough insights from genomics data in real time. Currently in the early adoption phase, key planned benefits include faster data processing through various stages of genomics pipeline — alignment, annotation and analysis — and immediate analysis of data in minutes rather than days. Researchers are envisioned to be able to analyze genetic variants of large-scale cohorts to find patterns of variation within and between populations. With better identification of clinically actionable genetic variants and real-time visibility into “in-the moment” situations, clinicians shall be able to understand and personalize care to patients with diseases such as Type II diabetes.
SAP Breaks Guinness World Record for Largest Data Warehouse
Sikka noted in the webcast that HANA has broken the Guinness World Record for the largest data warehouse ever built – 12.1 petabytes, which according to SAP is four times larger than the prior record. The record was broken with a combination of HANA and Sybase IQ working with a federated architecture.
“This shows the extreme scalability of HANA. Most people don’t yet associate HANA and SAP I the enterprise data warehouse world and I think that will change everybody’s mind,” said Becher. “People talk about the fact that in-memory databases cannot scale to super-large sizes, and that SAP does not have experience with super-large data warehouses,” added Sikka, noting, “The largest data warehouse record ever built is now ours.”