Skip to main content

SAP HANA 2 - Revolution or Evolution?

Yesterday SAP announced SAP HANA 2, an updated and improved version of its flagship product SAP HANA, and new SAP HANA microservices through SAP Hybris as a Service. SAP HANA 2 will be available for first customers on November 30 and an express edition shortly after its general availability. Note: if SAP talks about RTC this usually differs from General Availability, which is only after a successful ramp-up period of about 3 months to validate a product with early adopter customers. So the Express Edition will probably be released around end of Q1/2017.
In usual bold marketing words SAP HANA 2 is poised to be a “new foundation for digital transformation” and is according to Bernd Leukert, member of the executive board, Products and Innovation at SAP SE, the continuation of “breakthrough innovation on a highly stable core data platform for our customers”.
SAP HANA 2 shall deliver enhancements in the areas of database management, data management, analytical intelligence and application management as well as well as two more services for cloud customers: Text Analysis and Earth Observation Analysis. The latter in a beta status only. These latter two new HANA functionalities are likely to be the reason of tying the two announcements.
The update cycle of HANA 2 shall be 6 months.

Some Observations

It is interesting that SAP refers to the new HANA services as microservices. This suggests that these services are built on top of the HANA 2 core – or else HANA itself has been rearchitected to be built on a microservice architecture. I rather think the former, also as the delivery is via YaaS. So, SAP is somewhat muddling the waters here.
There is an enhancement to offload read-intensive workloads to secondary systems, with the reason to improve operations. While this seems sensible on the outset: Does this suggest that there are scaling problems with read operations?
A new edition of the SAP Enterprise Architecture Designer Web application with a focus on information (data) architecture is part of the delivery. Data architecture is only a small part of Enterprise Architecture, in fact part of the Systems Architecture domain, which in itself is one of four domains. I’d be interested to have a look at this tool.
The predictive analytics capabilities have been enhanced. Although the press release talks about “Analytical Intelligence” SAP does not jump on the bandwagon of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning here. This is interesting in itself.
The extension of runtimes to support additional languages and the enhanced file processor API is an important step although the statement of build packs and runtimes “can be used within SAP HANA extended application services, advanced model” is sufficiently fuzzy to raise some question marks.
There is no statement about upgrading/migrating from SAP HANA to SAP HANA 2.

My PoV

Assuming that the upgrade from SAP HANA to SAP HANA 2 is a simple upgrade we are definitely seeing an evolutionary approach here that combines additional functionality with ecosystem play and a (gentle) push into the cloud.
The push to cloud is evidenced by making some interesting services, namely the trio of Text Analysis services, available via YaaS only. While the Earth Observation Analysis service is interesting in itself its highest significance probably lies in its suggestion for an upcoming industry orientation on top of HANA. This would cater for SAP’s solution orientated strengths.
Making all these services available on top of the platform indicates the remuneration models SAP is going for: A base fee for platform and core applications plus usage based billing for sometimes important parts of functionality, which are delivered as metered services. It remains to be seen whether SAP finds a customer friendly balance here.
The ecosystem play shows itself in adding language runtimes and the express edition that both will attract additional developers who will build new services and applications on top of HANA. Combined with YaaS this is a powerful model.
A focus on analytics and integrating the platform into Enterprise Architecture is evident, although the EA angle likely needs quite some improvement. Why would I use the seemingly incomplete SAP Enterprise Architecture Designer when EA covers so much more than data architecture? However, the idea of using HANA as an architecture repository is quite intriguing.

Analytics is a core (horizontal) part of a platform as it is important for nearly every business scenario. Here we are coming to a concern, which revolves around what has not been announced. While very much hyped the topics of AI and machine learning are important. And both are platform technologies, as advanced analytics capabilities are. Salesforce just nonchalantly, almost in a sub-clause announced their Einstein as being part of their platform. SAP so far keeps fairly silent on both topics, apart from a partnership with IBM Watson.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Last Year's Top 5 Popular Posts

You are only as good as your customer remembers

As you know, I am very interested in how organizations are using business applications, which problems they do address, and how they review their success. In a next instance of these customer interviews, I had the opportunity to talk with Melissa Gordon , Executive Vice President, Enterprise Solutions at Tidal Basin about their journey with Zoho. You can watch the full interview on YouTube. Tidal Basin is a government contractor that provides various services throughout the government space, including disaster response, technology and financial services, and contact centers. Tidal Basin started with Zoho CRM and was searching for a project management tool in 2019. This was prompted by mainly two drivers. First, employees were asking for tools to help them running their projects. Second, with a focus on organizational growth and bigger projects that involved more people, Tidal Basin wanted to reduce its risk exposure and increase the efficiency of project delivery. This way, the compa...
Post a Comment
Read more

Sweet Transformation: Inside SugarCRM’s New Direction

Fresh from the 2025 SugarCRM Analyst Summit, waiting for my plane home, it is time to sort my thoughts. From Monday, 1/27 evening to Wednesday 1/29 in the morning we had some time jam packed with information and good conversations with SugarCRM execs, customers, and in between analysts. The main summit started with a bang, namely the announcement that industry icon Bob Stutz joins the SugarCRM board of directors , which is something that few of us, if any, had foreseen. This is exciting news.  With David Roberts , who succeeded Craig Charlton in September 2024, SugarCRM itself has a new CEO with a long time CRM pedigree.  As with every leadership change, this promises some change. Every new CEO evaluates what they see vs. where they want their company to go and then, together with the team, establishes and executes a plan to get there. Usually, this involves some change in the structure of the executive leadership team, too.  This is what happened and happens with SugarCR...
Post a Comment
Read more

Data Wars: SAP Vs. Salesforce In The AI-Driven Enterprise Future

The past weeks certainly brought a lot of news, with SAP Sapphire and Salesforce's surely strategically timed announcement of acquiring Informatica , ranging at the top. I have covered both in recent articles. The enterprise software landscape is crackling with energy, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is certainly the star of the show. It isn't anymore about AI as a mere feature; it's about AI as the strategic core of enterprise software. Two recent announcements underscored this shift: SAP's ambitious AI-centric vision that was unveiled at its Sapphire 2025 conference, and, arriving hot on its heels, Salesforce's agreement to acquire data management titan Informatica for $8 billion. Both signal an intensified battle for AI supremacy, where trusted, enterprise-wide data is the undisputed new monarch. Of course, SAP and Salesforce are not the only ones duking this one out. SAP's Sapphire Vision: An AI-Powered, Integrated Enterprise At its Sapphire 2025 event in ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The CDP is dead – long live the CDP!

In the past few years, I have written about CDPs, what they are and what their value is – or rather can be. My definition of a CDP that I laid out in one of my column articles on CustomerThink is:  A Customer Data Platform is a software that creates persistent, unified customer records that enable business processes that have the customers’ interests and objectives in mind. It is a good thing that CDPs evolved from its origins of being a packaged software owned by marketers, serving marketers. Having looked at CDP’s as a band aid that fixes the proliferation of data silos that emerged for a number of reasons, I have ultimately come to the conclusion and am here to say that the customer data platform as an entity is increasingly becoming irrelevant – or in the typical marketing hyperbole – dead.  Why is that? There are mainly four reasons for it.  For one, many an application has its own CDP variant already embedded as part of enabling its core functionality. Any engageme...
Post a Comment
Read more

CPQ, Meet Price Optimization: Your Revenue Lifecycle Just Got Serious

The news On October 1, 2025, Conga announced its intent to acquire the B2B business of PROS , following PRO’s acquisition by Thomas Bravo . At the same time, ThomaBravo and PROS announced that PRO’s travel business segment will be run as a standalone business . The bigger picture Revenue operations, revenue management and revenue lifecycle management have become a thing in the past years, as evidenced by the number of specialized companies that solve parts of the overall problem of optimizing revenue. It also got abused to some extent (e.g., surge pricing models) when the users of the corresponding capabilities consider optimizing being the same as maximizing. Reality check: It is not. While optimizing involves a bit of identifying how much a customer is willing to pay, it also involves the thought of repeat business, or in other words customer loyalty, even without a formal loyalty program. And that involves the customer experience, part of which the speed of creating a quote with mat...
Post a Comment
Read more