SAP Introduces First HANA-Enabled Application: Links and Screen Shots

SAP announced today at SAP TechEd Bangalore that the first version of SAP HANA (High-Performance Analytic Appliance) is now “released to customer” as part of BusinessObjects Strategic Workforce Planning application, the first in a new generation of in-memory applications based on SAP HANA.

HANA is part of the “great leap forward” in business analytics, bringing together the latest and best technology (column databases, hardware appliances, massive parallelism, in-memory processing, and intuitive analytic interfaces) to rethink and simplify how organizations access information.

Listen to SAP executive board member Vishal Sikka talk about HANA on SAP TV

According to SAP’s official HANA web page, the benefits of HANA are “Real Information, Real Action, Real Customer Benefits”:

• Make better decisions faster with new ways to look at your business based on instant, intuitive access to relevant information, along with greater ease of collaboration.
• Enable innovative new applications combining high volume transactions with analytics to dramatically improve existing planning, forecasting, pricing optimization, and other processes.
• Accelerate business performance while reducing TCO with less hardware, maintenance, and testing based on proven tools that are intuitive to implement whether delivered on-demand or via appliances.

The press release offered further information about SAP HANA’s performance:

• Very complex reports and queries against 500 billion point-of-sale records were run in less than one minute, thanks to the unique multi-core processing algorithms. This result was achieved on a system with 10 blades and 32 cores each.
• SAP HANA scales linearly with performance proportional to hardware improvements so in the future customers will be able to deploy systems with 1,000 or more cores that enable complex real-time analytics.
• SAP has mastered massive parallelism for enterprise applications (such as aging) with its in-memory computing engine, harnessing these benefits for business applications.

Here are some first screen shots of the application, courtesy of Hilmar Schepp and SAP News DE

More links:

• See HANA in action
• BusinessWeek: SAP’s Hana Speeds the Database Race
• SAP’s CIO Oliver Bussman on HANA
• Interview with Jacob Klein, VP Product Management for HANA
• Article on HANA in PC World by Chris Kanaracus.