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January 10, 2013

SAP ERP Suite Moves to HANA Database

By Jamie Epstein, TMCnet Web Editor

Today, the 10th of January, was marked by an exciting webcast held by SAP (News - Alert), a company dedicated to powering next generation innovations that continue to reshape the technology industry. The topic of discussion was how SAP’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) portfolio would now be running upon the company’s HANA database.



What does this move mean for the company? Well for one, it will help it to stand far ahead of others vying for its customer base such as IBM, Microsoft and Oracle (News - Alert). Also, it will serve as a much more easy to  use platform for end-users. In the third quarter of last year, the company was approaching its 1,000 customer mark, and since then, has grown to cater to tens of thousands of business suite consumers.

According to company officials, the platform’s intelligence, speed and simplicity will help the platform to run businesses without disruption. And “it will improve how they brand, market and sell everything they make, in addition to addressing customers as a segment of one and better serving its customer’s customer.”

By enabling users to closely analyze their business operations via one platform and moving away from disjointed views of the global enterprise, this innovative offering will encompass key analytic and transactional workloads, helping users to see a significant increase in processing power.

“SAP will roll out a fixed-price rapid deployment solution for Business Suite on HANA in the first quarter, which will enable customers to go live within six months,” a recent article revealed.

A representative from John Deere, a company known for its massive and extremely impressive agricultural-related machinery, spoke during the event, where he revealed that after the company celebrated its 175th anniversary, it quickly realized that it was in need of change, saying:

“Some changes always come with opportunities. As we are now focusing on global growth specifically within Brazil, Russia, India and China, we are giving our customers the ability to become more productive and more profitable, which is even more important in emerging markets. SAP HANA gives us ability to manage programs in real-time, serving as a way to manage our business in a different and a very revolutionary way.”

Complete with the ability to simulate financial closing in minutes as opposed to the  days and even weeks it takes today, from the  perspective of the business that caters to various industries including agricultural, residential, golf and sports, commercial, construction, forestry and military among others, it gives John Deere a unique opportunity that can be separated into three parts.

First is the ability to bring new innovations to businesses and helping partners solve problems that were deemed unsolvable in the past. Next is the simplification of IT stacks due to the fact that moving to HANA as a platform will reduce total cost of ownership and more efficiently deal with a large amount of data. Lastly, the suite will be utilized to make better decisions, provide crisper insights, and allow for opportunities that will in essence open up the doors for end- users leveraging mobile connectivity for self service.

Ovum (News - Alert) analysts concluded, "SAP Business Suite on HANA has the potential to be a game changer by making SAP much more relevant to its customers. But in the near term, SAP Business Suite on HANA should be seen as opportunistic upgrade for existing customers or greenfield opportunity for new ones. Few if any enterprises currently rank replacement of enterprise systems as top priority. Convincing customers that the transformative benefits of Suite on HANA will be non-disruptive technically is the challenge SAP faces with an entrenched Business Suite customer base. Companies don't swap out their database and ERP investments overnight.”


Edited by Allison Boccamazzo
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