{"id":12460,"date":"2015-04-14T19:49:57","date_gmt":"2015-04-14T18:49:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/?p=7255"},"modified":"2015-04-14T19:49:57","modified_gmt":"2015-04-14T18:49:57","slug":"why-hana-well-its-simple","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/2015\/04\/why-hana-well-its-simple.html","title":{"rendered":"Why HANA? Well, It’s Simple!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Even several years after its initial launch, I still\u00a0find\u00a0people who think\u00a0SAP HANA is primarily a\u00a0fast, expensive database —\u00a0a “luxury” that they don’t need and can’t afford.<\/p>\n

But from the very start, HANA wasn’t about “speed” — it was about how rapidly-falling\u00a0technical barriers would let us get much closer to\u00a0the age-old\u00a0vision of seamless, simplified management information systems.<\/p>\n

It’s already been six years since Hasso Plattner’s SIGMOD paper<\/a>\u00a0that pointed out that\u00a0existing relational database systems had failed to deliver on their promises:<\/p>\n

“Relational database systems have been the backbone of business applications for more than 20 years. We promised to provide companies with a management information system that covers the core applications, including financials, sales, order fulfillment, manufacturing, as well as human resources, which run from planning through business processes to individually defined analytics. However, we fell short of achieving this goal.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

After explaining the benefits of in-memory columnar systems, the paper went\u00a0on to predict a new generation of management information systems:<\/p>\n

[We]\u00a0predict enterprise systems …\u00a0where all business transactions, queries, including unrestricted aggregations and time-based sequences, can be answered in just a couple of seconds… We expect that the impact on management of companies will be huge, probably like the impact of Internet search engines on all of us. [The illustration below]\u00a0shows a future management meeting with information finally at your fingertips without any restriction.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"boardroom<\/a>
The Boardroom Of The Future<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Real-World Simplification<\/strong><\/p>\n

Thankfully, there’s no longer as\u00a0much need to debate the technical merits of HANA<\/a> — we can now “simply” talk about the benefits\u00a0delivered\u00a0by real-world deployments.<\/p>\n

Unilever<\/a> is a good example. It’s one of the largest consumer packaged goods companies in the world. Every day, two billion\u00a0people use its\u00a0products. It sells\u00a0a billion\u00a0deodorants and two billion\u00a0magnum ice-creams every year.<\/p>\n

By anybody’s definition, it’s\u00a0a very big, complex organization. But over the years, Unilever has become a master of innovation<\/em> through simplification<\/em>.<\/p>\n

A decade ago, the company\u00a0had over 250\u00a0enterprise resource planning applications. Working with SAP, that was\u00a0reduced down\u00a0to just four (and managed as one.) This helped streamline almost every aspect of the\u00a0business.<\/p>\n

They were early adopters of SAP HANA, using it first to accelerate their financial close<\/a>. That project was implemented as a no-risk “sidecar” acceleration system — if anything went wrong, the system would just go back to the (complex) processes that Unilever had always used in the past.<\/p>\n

But of course once people got used to seamless, iterative workflow\u00a0— rather than having to wait overnight for each batch load — it was hard to go back.<\/p>\n

At a recent conference, Marc B\u00e9chet, VP Global IT ERP of Unilever, explained that after a couple of quarters, a temporary problem with the sidecar pushed everybody back to the main system during month\u00a0end, resulting in angry delegations to IT: “don’t let that ever happen again!”<\/p>\n

As Unilever explained in a blog post last year, they quickly went “Beyond Acceleration<\/a>” — the success of the project led Unilever to\u00a0extend their use of SAP HANA\u00a0to many other areas\u00a0including product profitability and supply chain optimization.<\/p>\n

And they\u2019re now looking to the next big opportunities for innovation and simplification. They have done a proof of concept to take their entire European ERP system \u2014 all 38TB of information \u2014 and put it onto the SAP HANA in-memory system.<\/p>\n

\"unilever<\/a>
Source: Unilever<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

That simplified and compressed the data down to just 8Tb. This holds out the possibility of doing business in real-time, in ways that are simpler, faster, and smarter than in the past — and put the company\u00a0one step closer to that “boardroom of the future.”<\/p>\n

You can read many other examples of Unilever’s real-world experience in this detailed case study from The Business Transformation Journal: “Implementing the Real-Time Digital Enterprise to Unlock Value and Enable Business Growth<\/a>”<\/p>\n

The Conclusion is Simple<\/strong><\/p>\n

The big benefit of the new in-memory architectures isn’t speed, it’s simplicity, and flexibility, and the ability to do things in new ways.<\/p>\n

These types of benefits are notoriously difficult to\u00a0pinpoint\u00a0in advance, so looking to other organizations who have already gone through the transition can be a useful guide — and they tend to be clear about their decisions. As Marc\u00a0B\u00e9chet put it:<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we knew then what we know now, we would have started deploying SAP HANA much earlier, because it\u2019s so important for business… We think it\u2019s even more disruptive than we initially thought \u2014 we\u2019ve only just started<\/strong>\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The biggest benefit of in-memory systems like SAP HANA isn’t speed — it’s simplicity and flexibility<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":12831,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[14],"tags":[100,200,560,595,617,778,780,781,911,949,931,968],"class_list":["post-12460","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-thoughts","tag-analytics","tag-business-applications","tag-hana","tag-in-memory","tag-inmemory","tag-olap","tag-oltap","tag-oltp","tag-sap","tag-sap_hana","tag-saphana","tag-simple"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/boardroom-of-the-future-608x340-1.jpg?fit=608%2C340&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3X9RF-3eY","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12460","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12460"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12460\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12831"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12460"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}