SAP HANA Brings ROI of over 500% for University of Kentucky

SAP HANA is too often pigeonholed as expensive and only for extreme data needs.

But more and more companies are crunching the numbers and realizing that in-memory processing is simply a cheaper, better way to do analytics.

Dennis Howlett of Diginomica has already talked about the projected cost savings of $13M for one large government customer in his post Can SAP HANA bring real savings? Yes and the numbers are impressive.

Now a new post on the SAP HANA blog has provided an IDC analysis of the University of Kentucky’s move to the HANA platform.

HANA of course brought the expected technology benefits:

• Up to 420 times faster data reporting than legacy system
• Up to 15 times improvement in query load times
• Average data compression improvement of 77%
• Up to 87% reduction in extract, transform, and load (ETL) times
• Up to 80% of data updated in real time

But what’s important is that this translates in direct business savings for the University compared to existing approaches:

• $6.17 million in benefits (discounted) over five years
• ROI of 509%
• Payback in 9.5 months

(Yes, it’s a 3D pie chart. You’ll get over it 🙂 )*

And it’s not just about doing things more efficiently today, it’s about the new possibilities for the future:

“The university believes that SAP HANA will help it realize other benefits, such as improved staff utilization rates, efficiencies in budgeting, and even revenue-producing mobile applications, although this study has not quantified these potential benefits because they are less near term in nature.”

Download the study for more details!

* Matt Hawkins of Kingfisher decided he couldn’t get over it, and decided to use Lumira Cloud instead — awesome!