Update: SAP ports its Business Suite to HANA

IDG News Service - SAP's flagship Business Suite enterprise resource planning (ERP) software can now run on top of the HANA in-memory database, in a move that stands to open new frontiers of competition with the likes of Oracle, IBM and Microsoft.

The announcement, which was made Thursday, had been expected for some time. Business Suite on HANA is currently in RTC (release to customers) mode, SAP's preferred term for a beta period. General availability should come toward the middle of this year, executive board member and technology chief Vishal Sikka said in an interview prior to the announcement.

SAP has positioned HANA as an eventual convergence point for all its technologies, as well as a simpler yet more sophisticated alternative to existing architectures. A recent update to HANA added an application server that runs within the system, and SAP is also building out a set of PaaS (platform as a service) capabilities for the database.

But the Business Suite compatibility for HANA will give SAP an opportunity to take business away from rival database vendors, whose products SAP customers now use widely underneath the Suite.

All database platforms currently certified for the Suite will continue to be supported, however, according to SAP.

Still, it seems clear that SAP, which has resold other companies' databases for years, would rather have a larger share of the pie.

In the past, SAP's competitors "tried to portray HANA as an analytic database," Sikka said. With compatibility for transactional applications like the Business Suite, "we are disproving that in a big way," he added.

But with HANA, Business Suite customers will be able to run analytic and transactional workloads in the same platform, he added. Business Suite users will also enjoy a major gain in processing power, but it's not just speed for speed's sake, Sikka said. For example, an MRP (manufacturing resource planning) batch processing job that might take six hours today could run in seconds on HANA. "I imagine a world where [manufacturing planning] can be based on precise calculations of demand, on the fly," he said.

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.

In addition, SAP has tweaked the pricing model for Business Suite on HANA, basing the cost of HANA usage on a percentage of the customer's application maintenance fees.

However, HANA is sold as a specialized appliance on hardware from a number of vendors, so would-be Business Suite customers will also have to factor those acquisition costs into account.

SAP has sold HANA Enterprise Edition according to the amount of RAM in the appliance. The licensing model for the Suite on HANA was influenced by DSAG, the German-speaking SAP User Group, according to an announcement it released Thursday.