SAP Now Runs on HANA

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SAP has rolled out a new version of its flagship ERP software that runs on SAP’s own HANA in-memory database. The announcement puts SAP’s HANA in more direct competition with databases from Oracle, IBM and Microsoft.

Bloomberg BusinessWeek’s Aaron Ricadela and Cornelius Rahn reported, “SAP AG (SAP) unveiled the biggest overhaul to its mainstay enterprise software in two decades, in a move to cement its dominance in that market while springing an attack on Oracle Corp. (ORCL)’s database business. At an event in Palo Alto, California, the German company showed a much faster version of its Business Suite software running on top of its Hana database. By speeding up business tasks from pricing airline tickets to predicting weather, SAP is pushing to replace database software from Oracle, Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) and International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) that customers use to process and analyze information, SAP executives said.”

NetworkWorld’s Chris Kanaracus added, “The announcement, which was made Thursday, had been expected for some time. Business Suite on HANA is currently in RTC (release to customers) mode, SAP’s preferred term for a beta period. General availability should come toward the middle of this year, executive board member and technology chief Vishal Sikka said in an interview prior to the announcement.”

Quentin Hardy with The New York Times noted, “SAP is betting that a product that brought in 1.5 percent of its 2011 revenue is ready to scatter the competition, maybe even revolutionize SAP itself. It’s not a crazy idea. The product, called HANA, uses technology far more advanced than in most of SAP’s business software products. It delivers data management and analysis up to 1,000 times faster, the German company says. SAP claims that marketing and production reports that used to take six hours can sometimes be done in less than 10 seconds on HANA.”

GigaOm’s David Meyer explained, “The point of ‘SAP Business Suite powered by SAP Hana’ (currently available to existing customers) is to marry online transaction processing with analytics, with the primary benefit being speed. Indeed, SAP chairman Hasso Plattner said at the launch on Thursday that the goal for transactional query response times was three seconds.”