SAP recently announced the availability of SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA, a new option for SAP Business Suite customers. SAP now provides an integrated family of business applications that captures and analyses transactional data in real time on a single in-memory platform. SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA empowers customers to run their business in real time within the window of opportunity to transact, analyse and predict instantly and proactively in an unpredictable world.
Sharing his views on SAP’s announcement, Ray Wang, Principal Analyst & CEO, Constellation Research, Inc. said, “The move to put ERP on an in memory database such as HANA is significant for SAP customers. Speed is the difference between a 5 day drug recall and a 5 minute drug recall, and also between a 30 day supply chain plan versus the ability to reroute 2 iPhones to your store in 30 seconds. As this is their flagship product, they have to get it right. And if SAP does succeed, the impact will be huge.”
According to Constellation Research, SAP is not the first to do this - Workday has already done this for HR and Finance. However, for the entire SAP suite and given SAP’s market share, this is a big deal. “The analytics and crunching capabilities is what’s driving organisations to seek faster speed. Right-time requirements for in-context computing will turn out to be the surprise benefit as relevancy becomes more important through time, location, role, relationship, sentiment, and intent. If the performance difference is creating a huge competitive advantage, I would imagine that a lot of people would consider adopting HANA,” he added.