Demystifying SAP® HANA: Understanding Options, Determining the Best Path

Although SAP HANA products have been around for some time, they continue to evolve, and we continue to find that many clients remain unsure of how to best unlock the potential of HANA solutions within their organizations. Most know that HANA is SAP’s high-powered, in-memory column and row store database. Yet many overlook the fact that SAP HANA is much more than a really quick database. It offers a multitude of functionality, including a database which also serves as the db foundation for many of SAP’s Netweaver based solutions, a development platform and a data warehouse solution. In addition, SAP HANA can function as the foundation for the BI platform, providing users the ability to model business scenarios in real-time, adding tremendous value. Yet, not all versions of SAP HANA are equal.

At the recent 2018 BI/HANA conference, Protiviti Managing Director (and co-author of this post) Don Loden presented a breakout session on understanding and demystifying the SAP HANA options available. During that session, Loden discussed real-world use cases and used product demonstrations to help attendees understand when and where HANA options make sense and the impacts these solutions have on complex global organizations.

During the conference session, Loden outlined the most common options for SAP HANA. First is SAP Suite on HANA or SAP S/4HANA. With both, HANA becomes the data platform that runs business suite applications. But in a true S/4HANA world users see another lift in performance because S/4 has been purposely designed for HANA.

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Don Loden