So let’s dissect the press release in our custom style (it can be found here):
NICE, France — June 16, 2015 — SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today announced the release of service pack 10 (SPS10) for the SAP HANA® platform, helping customers successfully extend all the key functionalities of their core business to the edge of the network where remote business transactions and events actually occur. The latest release delivers new
capabilities that help customers connect with the Internet of Things (IoT) at enterprise scale, manage Big Data more effectively, further extend high availability of data across the enterprise and develop new applications. The announcement was made at SAPinsider HANA 2015, being held June 16-18 in Nice, France.
MyPOV – Good to see SAP to follow up with its plans from Sapphire (my event report here) and deliver the key new functionality side – which is all about the support of Hadoop for BigData and IoT scenarios. On top of that SAP has put in a lot of new functionalities beyond good housekeeping – but let’s read on.
“SAP HANA gives customers one integrated platform for transactional and analytic workloads,” said Quentin Clark, chief technology officer, SAP. “The new capabilities of SAP HANA ensure data center-readiness, synchronization data to any remote system, extend high availability and disaster recovery of enterprise data and perform advanced analytics. We are readying our customers for the inevitable digitization of our entire economy.”
MyPOV – Good quote from CTO Clark, correctly focusing on necessary (and some would say overdue) good database capabilities like data center readiness, remote synchronization and HA / DR. We know a number of enterprises have been waiting for these capabilities to start or extend their investments into HANA – so it’s good to see SAP delivering on these.
Connecting to the Internet of Things at Enterprise Scale
The new remote data synchronization feature of SAP HANA enables organizations to synchronize data between the enterprise and remote locations at the edge of the network. Developers can now build IoT and data-intensive mobile apps that leverage SAP HANA remote data synchronization between the enterprise and remote locations via the SAP® SQL Anywhere® suite – a leading enterprise-ready, embeddable database technology with more than 12 million licenses. Now, enterprise data can be securely captured, accessed and fed back into SAP HANA from remote workplaces such as retail stores and restaurants. In addition, customers can collect and analyze IoT data for performing critical tasks at distant locations including predictive maintenance on ships, pumping stations and in mines with low bandwidth or intermittent connections or even while offline.
MyPOV – SAP keeps harping on the IoT use case which finally, with Hadoop support, becomes a real strategy for HANA customers. And it is good to see that SAP is leveraging assets from the former Sybase, the venerable but proven SQL Anywhere. SAP being able to use the SQL Anywhere offline and remote capabilities, included with the synchronization functions is a good move. More things than we think don’t have continuous, good, reliable wireless (or event network) access.
Streamlining Data Access and Management of Big Data
Businesses can continue to harness Big Data using expanded smart data integration capabilities of SAP HANA to the latest Hadoop distributions from Cloudera and Hortonworks. Additional enhancements for SAP HANA include faster data transfer with Spark SQL and a single user interface (UI) for SAP HANA and Hadoop cluster administration using Apache Ambari. IT organizations can also take advantage of new rules-based data movement among multiple storage tiers based on business requirements. For example, organizations can set up rules to keep one year of data in memory and set a rule to move older data to disk storage or Hadoop. Finally, customers can have greater confidence in the data they arecollecting with new smart data quality capabilities for SAP HANA to cleanse data and merge duplicates by using an easy-to-use, Web-based development workbench.
MyPOV – A very good (and overdue) move by SAP allowing the usual hot, less hot and cold separation of data. A year ago mentioning Hadoop in SAP circles was a bad word, it is remarkable and applaudible (?) to see SAP turning the corner here and supporting the most prominent enabling database technology for next generation applications. Spark was already mentioned at Sapphire and will be key for SAP to make the future offering fly. More to come.
It is also key for SAP to support both Cloudera and Hortonworks on the distribution side, SAP cannot pay favorites here (and should not either). And always good to see SAP use common open source tools like Ambari. And good to see more data cleansing and quality options, something always good to have and previously required 3rd party solutions.
Extending High Availability and Scalability Across the Enterprise
SAP HANA delivers new high availability and disaster recovery capabilities to help ensure data center readiness and support for always-on, mission-critical applications. Features such as 1-to-n asynchronous replication, auto-host failover for dynamic tiering and incremental backups help reduce system downtime and facilitate true business continuity across the enterprise. In addition, companies can leverage the NUMA (non-uniform memory access) -aware architecture of SAP HANA to support large scale systems with more than 12TB of memory to rapidly process large data sets and improve overall business performance. Enhancements in workload management help further improve mixed workload performance to optimize resource more effectively.
MyPOV – Good to see SAP extending and catching up on HA and DR capabilities – something customers have been focussing on for since quite some time. Dynamic tiering is a key capability to optimize cost and performance and something customer equally do welcome. Finally NUMA support is key to keep HANA on the cutting edge of both processor and in memory capability, an important move by SAP. Though SAP has not been explicit on this, one can almost read the learning between the lines of SAP running more and more HANA applications for their customers. Along that comes important lessons learnt and key additions to the product. [...]
Innovating Through Advanced Analytics
With the expanded data processing capabilities in SAP HANA SPS10, businesses can accelerate the development of powerful applications with advanced analytics. SAP HANA text mining now extends to the SQL syntax, making it easier for developers to build next-generation applications. The new spatial processing enhancements of SAP HANA include support multidimensional objects and spatial expressions in SAP HANA models or SQLScript. As a result, developers can incorporate engaging visualizations in their business applications.
MyPOV – To a certain point SAP HANA comes full circle, as it started with T-Rex – an in memory search solution that SAP developed a long time ago. Allowing now for SQL queries to enable text mining is like text search of T-Rex making it fully to the database world, being accessible with the universal database language SQL. Moreover, good to see SAP keeping investing into spatial support, which is critical to build real world modelling, next generation applications. Humans and things have locations and knowing and understanding them is crucial for a modern database.
Strong Momentum on SAP HANA
The number of customers transforming their business with SAP HANA is dramatically increasing. SAP HANA currently has more than 6,400 customers, almost doubling from only one year ago. SAP HANA Cloud Platform has quickly built momentum with approximately 1,400 customers. SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA (SAP S/4HANA) has driven tremendous interest out of the gate with more than 370 customers in 2015 alone. The SAP Business Warehouse application on SAP HANA continues to have strong traction with over 1,900 customers. Adoption of SAP HANA by startups has soared, with more than 1,900 leveraging the SAP HANA platform today. In addition, there are more than 815,000 active users of SAP HANA.
MyPOV – Kudos to SAP for sharing the most complete number on SAP HANA adoption. These are impressive numbers, but it looks like progress may have slowed down a bit, comparing with the very high growth numbers from the early HANA years. But all high growth needs to be converted in sustainable growth based on real use cases and here SAP has made good progress. Better 100 live customers and references than 500 interested parties that don’t do much (the number are completely my manufacturing, to illustrate the point).
Overall MyPOV
At the pre-kindergarten age of 4.5 years, HANA is growing up fast. It is good to see that SAP keeps supporting and extending older ‘growth spurts’ like spatial and not abandoning them. HANA is helping SAP internally to host applications built on HANA, and that daily work has an influence on the product roadmap and releases. Using your own HANA has advantages. (Ok the analogy has to stop somewhere).
Extending the HA / DR capabilities is key housekeeping, that to a certain point was even overdue. The exiting new capabilities are the Hadoop support enabling BigData and IoT use cases.
On the concern side, SAP needs to keep expanding SAP HANA capabilities and drive to more customer adoption. It has made the right moves on the product side, now it needs to get the early customer adoption to show case the new capabilities, but that’s a good and natural problem to have. And as SAP has not abandoned some early development strands (e.g. special) but keeps supporting and extending them, it is clear that SAP has the R&D know how and budget to keep developing and investing in SAP HANA.
Overall congratulations to SAP for a new and rich SAP HANA release with SPS 10 – it’s time for the 4.5 year old HANA to go to preschool soon (for the non US based reader that is the year before 1st grade in the US).
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