Here is a good news for SAP customers across the world. SAP (Systems Applications and Products,) the enterprise-software tycoon after many years of constant effort has brought in HANA (the analytics database platform) as enterprise cloud service.
Last year the news of “SAP All-in-One business applications integration with Amazon’s cloud” made a big blow. After 5 months of it now, the availability of HANA cloud service has added a new feather to SAP’s cloud business model.
SAP launched HANA in the year of 2010, but HANA in-memory database was publicly available for Amazon Web Services in 2012. Customers and partners could then easily try out this platform without installing any hardware components or buying any perpetual software licenses at an hourly rate.
However, the fundamental customer needs have increased manifold. It was crucial for SAP to bring its wares to the cloud and thus reduce prices and offer more flexibility to customers. SAP HANA Enterprise cloud gives more and more options to the customers in how they can take advantage of seamless cloud business application service. Dr. Vishal Sikka of SAP Technology and Innovation said that HANA will simplify customer experience and offer them the freedom of how they want to use SAP.
How will HANA database platform help customers?
HANA Enterprise cloud allows users to run SAP business suite applications in the cloud. Programs like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Data warehousing, and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) can be run on HANA cloud. The advantages are many for the business suite as the technology will enable faster time to market during real-time business process. SAP professionals claimed that this cloud-based offering will reduce infrastructure cost as users need not to buy expensive servers in bulk for use with HANA.
The good news is that SAP has already set up 7 data centres across the world to run the cloud–based HANA platform. As per official report the company is going to deploy around 3,00,000 computer system to run the program. As far as pricing of HANA Enterprise Cloud is concerned, the firm is yet to reveal it in public. It is expected they will disclose more information about the product at the end of May during annual Sapphire Now convention in Orlando, Florida.
SAP has been continually updating their product strategies in the recent months. They are much in news also. In the month of March, SAP announced that HANA had achieved the milestone of 1000 users , almost 2 years after the Enterprise cloud system became generally available. Among the premium customers of HANA a few names are Vodafone, healthcare giant Bayer and agriculture machinery firm John Deere.
In a report in the month of March, analyst firm Ovum said that HANA is not affordable for small and medium scale businesses. The average license sale of HANA is $400,000. The hardware itself may cost from $63000 to $2.4 million. However, the company still works to minimise the cost substantially.
HANA is also working out on its database capacity. By end of the end HANA is expected to run on hardware with 8TB of RAM which will support up to 5 TB of uncompressed data. So, there is a large scale of improvement HANA will phase through as SAP leader Partha Chakraborty foresees. He also stressed on security matters as storing business applications with HANA is completely safe and customers can be comfortable about that.
In a nut shell, SAP’s decision to take HANA into cloud is a winning choice.
With this news, the demand of SAP HANA jobs has reached to a new height. SAP HANA is becoming a popular term with more than 7.860.000 search results and 135.000 global monthly searches in Google. There are going to be more and more SAP HANA jobs available across the world. In terms of recent job opportunities reported by , USA stands first followed by the UK, Germany, India and Australia.
