SAP to unveil HANA 2

SAP kicked off its European Edition of its developer conference TechEd in Barcelona today, and the big news was the announcement of SAP HANA 2.

Definitively work our customary news analysis (check out my tweets, too as I am attending the conference) it can be found here:

BARCELONA, Spain — Nov. 8, 2016 — SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today announced SAP® HANA 2, the next-generation of the SAP HANA platform optimized for innovation. SAP HANA 2 will include and extend the proven technology from the first release of SAP’s breakthrough in-memory platform to provide a new foundation for digital transformation. In addition, new SAP HANA microservices in the cloud are available via SAP Hybris as a Service (YaaS) to spur developer innovation by embedding richer insight into modern applications. These announcements were made at SAP TechEd, being held November 8-10 in Barcelona.

MyPOV – Interesting that SAP Hybris is part of the first paragraph, but that was to be anticipated from Sapphire, where SAP discovered its new love affair with micro services. The ‘include and extend’ reads like a ‘fork’ in the product line – but let’s read on.

“SAP pioneered in-memory computing with the launch of SAP HANA in 2010 and throughout our journey we have driven breakthrough innovation on a highly stable core data platform for our customers,” said Bernd Leukert, member of the Executive Board, Products & Innovation, SAP SE. “The release of SAP HANA 2 will mark a milestone in the industry, as it represents the next-generation of SAP HANA that will propel customers toward a successful and prosperous digital future.”

SAP HANA 2 will be released to customers on November 30, 2016. The express edition of SAP HANA 2 will be delivered upon validation shortly after general availability to help organizations jumpstart new development projects. As an innovation platform, SAP HANA 2 will deliver technology enhancements twice a year to support agile IT.

MyPOV – Kudos for SAP to provide a hard date for RTC, and for shipping the express edition that is key for customer and prospect sandbox activities. Embedded also that HANA 2 will have new capabilities twice a year – a usual pace these days – but a pace that is possibly too fast for customers who do not need new features and want to run in production and now can stay on SPS12 for about 3 years.

Planned new key features and enhancements to help IT transform include:
• Database Management – IT organizations will be able to ensure business continuity with enhanced high-availability, security, workload management, and administration enhancements. For example, the new active / active read-enabled option will enable IT organizations to leverage secondary systems – previously used only for system replication – to offload read-intensive workloads for improved operations.

MyPOV – Always good to see SAP adding capabilities in Data Management, an era where the relatively you HANA product – now a first grader – was behind the university student or seasoned professionals (pardon the age comparison between database product and humans, but it illustrates the difference well) and need to catch up. Interesting that read performance gets mentioned here.

• Data Management – Businesses are expected to leverage all data regardless of where it resides with enhancements to enterprise modeling, data integration, data quality and tiered storage. For example, the new SAP Enterprise Architecture Designer, Edition for SAP HANA is a Web-based solution that will allow IT organizations to manage complex information architectures and visualize the potential impact of new technologies before they are implemented.

MyPOV – Same as Database Management – good to see SAP adding capabilities in the Data Management area. Looking forward to see the Enterprise Architecture Designer.

• Analytical Intelligence – Developers are projected to embed rich insight into applications with enhanced analytical processing engines for text, spatial, graph and streaming data. For example, new algorithms for classification, association, time series and regression have been added to the predictive analytics library, which will empower data scientists to discover new patterns and incorporate machine learning in custom applications.

MyPOV – Very important additions for HANA overall, an area where it needed to get stronger, with this release HANA gets to par with other database options for next generation applications.

• Application Development – Developers are expected to build and deploy next-generation applications with enhanced capabilities for the application server, development tools and languages. For example, Bring your own Language support provides a choice of additional third party build packs and runtimes that can be used within the SAP HANA extended application services, advanced model. Also, a new file processor API will enable developers to extract text or metadata from documents for delivering deeper insights.

MyPOV – BYOL is big news for HANA, and a good move by SAP. Look forward to check out the file processor at TechEd this week.

New SAP HANA Microservices in the Cloud
Users of cloud-based microservices powered by SAP HANA can enhance applications with analytical insight with simple APIs using any language or development platform.
The new cloud services include:
• Entity extraction, fact extraction and linguistic analysis: Use text data processing capabilities of a managed SAP HANA instance in the cloud for application enhancement with natural language processing.

MyPOV – Good to see capabilities that the SAP Hybris teams has developed to run the product on HANA – now finding their way to public consumption with HANA 2. NLP is a key component of next generation applications as voice is quickly becoming the new UI.

• Earth Observation Analysis service (beta): Co-innovated with European Space Agency (ESA) and based on the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) EO-WCS standard, this microservice accesses satellite data from ESA and uses SAP HANA spatial processing in the cloud. The new service was announced today in conjunction with Munich RE, for delivering real-time and historic information about vegetation, water, soil and other spectral indexes. […]

MyPOV – Always good to see co-innovation project assets making it into project, in this case it is good to see not only the co-innovator (ESA) but also a first adopter (Munich Re) on the press release.

Overall MyPOV

Always good to see vendors innovating and today it is SAP with HANA 2. Likely, the background of the move is a positive one: HANA has now been adopted by so many customers that run HANA based applications in production, that they want SAP to slow down and keep a working release stable and running. On the flip side SAP cannot rest idle, and other customers (sometimes even the same one) want SAP to keep innovating and build new capabilities into HANA at rapid space. So SAP has gone back to the old and proven trick of all enterprise software vendors of providing two releases – a stable one for production at the current state -and a rapid evolving one with HANA 2. And it looks like SAP got the priorities for HANA 2 right with Data and Database Management, Analytics and better developer support.

On the concern side one could say that is is ‘just’ a glorified fork (physical and / or logical) tine in the HANA product, with HANA 2 capabilities just being what would have come in SP13 (more or less). A true new platform would have been for SAP to embrace, endorse and extend Hadoop – running on all media – not just in memory, but SSD, spinning rust (aka HDD) etc. But what has not happened can still come…

Overall a good move by SAP, that helps customers to try out HANA with the Express Edition, stabilize and run in production with HANA SP12 and go on innovating with HANA2. And listening and helping out customers is not a bad path for anyone in enterprise software. Let’s check how each three will be adopted, stay tuned.

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SAP to unveil HANA 2

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