1.3 Why HANA?

I have heard this question many times from customers and colleagues and I usually ask back:

"Why not HANA!?"

There are pro’s and con’s and I won’t even try to do a 100% feature-to-feature comparison with alternative technologies. I do not get paid by SAP to promote HANA either. But if we look from an enterprise architecture perspective we know that with the existing SAP systems there is no way around HANA in the next 10 years. SAP won't simply support anything else than HANA anymore and will ship all current and future innovations only on top of this technology. For the SAP world the decision is easy: either a) implement HANA or b) shutdown the SAP systems.

As I personally do not know a single SAP customer who goes for option b), the central question for them is: "Can we use HANA beyond the SAP systems?" The answer to this question is obviously “yes”. But what are the prerequisites? What are the benefits, what the obstacles? From my experiences a lot of companies have the wrong picture in mind when answering these questions. Instead of using dedicated databases for each application, I intend to implement one single HANA instance for many, if possible for all (!) applications. So from a technical perspective, the decisive question is:

Is HANA capable of serving the needs of many different applications in parallel at once?
Does it have enough power and flexibility to do this?
And if yes, how does it change the current enterprise architecture?
And most important - what does it mean for Business and IT?

But even if a company does not have any SAP system at all in the whole landscape, if the IT department there has absolutely no idea what HANA is and is far away from implementing the software, this company will most probably widely benefit from it. I will show that even without any synergies with existing SAP systems, HANA is still a very attractive option and that it is not really difficult to find a business case. Instead the benefits are huge.

By the way and off the records: in my opinion SAP has very good reasons to bet on HANA and you will find many of them also in this blog.

1.2 Summary

For readers who do not have much time this chapter gives an overview of the most important thoughts of the blog.

Current challenges in grown system landscapes

1. Today's default system architecture paradigm is client-server with dedicated servers for applications and databases.
2. Historical limitations in computing power led to fragmented, complex system landscapes with artificially inflated volumes of duplicated and inconsistent data. 
3. Data is exchanged over point-to-point interfaces or enterprise application integration-infrastructures (EAI) mostly in asynchronous batch runs.
4. Operations and maintenance of these landscapes is extremely expensive and they are not prepared to support the business in the digital era.

The following picture illustrates how today's IT landscapes look like from a high-level technical perspective. The systems in the top row represent applications with their respective servers. "Blue" systems are dedicated reporting systems (read only). The systems in the bottom row represent database servers. I have not included mainframe systems in the picture which we nevertheless still find frequently. The arrows in the picture represent data exchange processes between the applications.

 Proposed solution

1. Introduction of a new system architecture approach with a Corporate Data Pool based on HANA as single point-of-truth.
2. Protection of investments into application logic while shutting down all isolated data silos.
3. Step-by-step transition without interruption of business and with immediate benefits.

The illustration below shows how the example landscape from above will look like after a complete transition. The isolated database servers have been eliminated and now all data is stored in exactly one HANA database with no duplicates anymore. By eliminating the data silos we subsequently got rid of our interfaces and batch runs for data provisioning. We decommissioned the dedicated reporting- and in this example also one operational system and integrated their functionality in the remaining three operational systems with embedded analytics. We kept all required application logic with minimal adaptations.

Sounds easy - still not many enterprises are doing it yet. Why?! Because here I introduce HANA into an environment where it is not at all used today: running, productive non-SAP systems. This has amazing and unexpected effects which offer new options for users.

1.1 Welcome

… to my blog project “Move beyond”. Thanks for being here.

If this is your first time on this blog and you are not sure what this is all about I recommend you to read through the “About this blog”- section first which you can reach directly through the top-level navigation.

I have been dealing with enterprise IT systems during my whole professional career. I have seen many system landscapes and even more technologies. Some of them were hypes and gone, others are here to stay. The purpose of all of them is to guarantee the survival of the business and in contrast to consumer IT (like desktop PCs, Smartphone, Tablets, Consumer software, etc.) these systems have long investment and usage cycles. Once a company made a decision concerning their enterprise architecture they have to live with it for many years if not for several decades. That is why all businesses keep on adding features and new systems to their landscape all the time. The result today is an unmanageable complexity and high costs of operations which are major inhibitors to urgently need (digital) innovations.

In this blog I will show how SAP HANA® will potentially change the game in a way which is not yet widely discussed in the market. To my believe enterprises are missing a great opportunity to transform the IT and the way they do business in the future. At many companies that I work with this is simply due to the fact that they are not aware of the additional option they have. Forget for a moment what you know about SAP. You won't find much on that in this blog. I will treat HANA as what it is in its core: a software to store data, also known as "database".

The growing number of HANA evangelists might contradict and respond to me that it is much more than that and that I in return will miss many pieces of the story - just look at what SAP is currently doing with it. They are right. I will come to that point later in the blog. My central intention above anything else is to convince a user who has never used a piece of SAP software before that HANA is potentially the end of all of his relational database systems.

With that in mind let’s get started.