HANA :an extraordinarily strong transaction processor

Virtualization technology made it feasible for databases of gigabyte or even terabyte size to be managed entirely in memory. This accomplishment has breathed new life into a space that hadn't seen a lot of action in the last decade. Venerable players like SAP (parent company of Sybase) are finding new ways not only to compete with Oracle but potentially exceed it. It has also opened the door for VMware to break into the database space with SQLFire. This technology, paired with a big-data storage system like Hadoop, is making customers wonder what the advantage of Oracle or SQL Server is supposed to be.

The ability to manage large databases in memory is a game-changer in a variety of activities and industries. "Having millions of people connecting to an application that's underpinned by a spinning disk, it's just not going to return information fast enough," remarks David McJannet, VMware's director of cloud and application services, in an interview with ReadWriteWeb. "You see it when people are scanning with a barcode reader or with their cell phone. They scan something, and then they wait three, four, five seconds for the answer to come back. That experience is not acceptable for most new applications, where people expect near-instant response regardless of where they are."

Fire in the Hole

The emerging space of in-memory database systems now includes VMware SQLFire, SAP HANA and Oracle's TimesTen for Exalogic (through a 2005 acquisition). All of these were designed as pure transactional databases for storage, retrieval and updating of records. However, they're being marketed differently in order to break into some market, somewhere. TimesTen, for example, is often treated as a cache for Exalogic, as something that extends rather than replaces the Exalogic experience. That makes sense from a company that doesn't want to cannibalize its own product line but also would prefer not to be eaten alive. HANA is an extraordinarily strong transaction processor, but is being marketed by SAP as an analytics system, better suited to online analytical processing (OLAP) applications. Today, SAP is pairing HANA with another of its acquisitions, SuccessFactors, in hopes that a killer app will expose HANA to a wider audience.

SQLFire's value proposition is what media marketers would call a "pure play" and, as such, is more of a gamble on VMware's part. Having no legacy database platform of its own to cannibalize, VMware is in a position to market SQLFire as a faster transactional processing system than most anything currently deployed - as an all-around player, not an extension or an add-on. And although SQLFire may be well-suited for typical online transaction processing (OLTP) applications that utilize relatively simple schemae, as virtualization systems like VMware's vFabric become more adept, the schematic differences may become negligible.

"Disk is the new tape," proclaims VMware's McJannet. "It's considered to be a permanent mechanism, but not really appropriate for the main day-to-day interaction with data. I think SAP HANA is a fascinating example of this trend coming to life. With SAP HANA, I think the way we would describe it is to say there's huge disruption going on in the data landscape. We think of it in three different directions: One, there's clearly a move to Big Data, where the volumes of data that people are working with are massively different today than they were a few years ago. That's largely about how to do analytics on Big Data volumes, and you see technologies like Hadoop really coming to the fore there. [Two,] we believe there's a similar shift that we would refer to as 'Fast Data,' which is really about this shift to in-memory to accomodate these new kinds of applications. People expect near-instantaneous response at a scale that really didn't exist five to 10 years ago. So as a category, we see a huge shift towards in-memory at the data tier. And SAP, with HANA, is clearly perfectly aligned to this shift. For analytics applications around the SAP data warehouse, they're saying, let's push that into memory so that I can return analytics information for my users far faster than if that data were all stored on a spinning disk."

source: http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2012/06/vmwares-database-play-disk-is-the-new-tape.php

For Univ. of Kentucky, SAP's HANA is 'disruptive'

The University of Kentucky says it has reshaped its business intelligence (BI) capability as a result of adopting SAP's in-memory system, HANA. Vince Kellen, the university CIO, calls it a "disruptive technology," and for this institution at least, that appears true.

Analysts are more restrained in their assessments of HANA, in part, because of a tug of war between so-called engineered systems, represented by something like Oracle's Exadata platform, and systems that use x86 hardware platforms such as HANA.

Whether the one-year-old HANA system succeeds for SAP may depend, in part, on whether it gets new customers for the company. University of Kentucky is already an SAP customer.

But none of these tech industry issues change how the university used SAP's in-memory technology to reshape its business intelligence services.

Kullen said the university was searching for ways to improve retention rates of its students and boost number of students who graduate.

The university collects detailed data about student retention at various stages of academic progress. It has course history, grades, class attendance data from the classes that track it, and engagement data -- a measure of student participation in virtual classroom spaces, including discussions and assignment downloads.

"All of that engagement information gives us clues as to what is going on with student retention," said Kullen.

The university initially wanted to identify students that may be having problems and to create automated workflows to proactively contact students and faculty, with activities ranging from a simple email poke to tutoring services.

But getting at that information is difficult. Typically, it would have involved building a data warehouse and then employing ETL activities (extract, transformation and load). But with HANA, the university was able to use real-time replication right from SAP systems that collect this data, via HANA-ready feeds.

"We saw the opportunity to transform how our business intelligence teams work," said Kullen.

Instead of manually aggregating data and running batch processes, the university's approximately 14-member BI team has morphed from being "back office plumbers" to serving as "advisors and model builders for our users," said Kullen.

The new system has been in production for about a month, and it will take time to see what impact it has on student retention, said Kullen.

The system was built on Dell hardware, and the university is using the vendor's services. Dell has developed student retention data models for the school, and has made them part of their services offerings.

Burk Buechler, portfolio director for Dell application services, said the company built the university system in two phases. It first got HANA deployed and connected to key data points, then built analytical dashboards.

Underlying the broader use of HANA is whether to use x86 systems or so-called engineered systems, which include IBM's recently announced PureSystems approach.

Engineered systems offer performance gains, meaning faster time to realize value and "less cumbersome" management, said Alys Woodward, a research director at IDC. On the other hand, "software on commodity hardware reduces vendor lock-in and enables the use of cheaper components," said Woodward.

How SAP HANA "will play in the broader marketplace -- outside SAP's core install base -- against Oracle Exadata and IBM engineered systems, depends to some extent on how these two opposing concepts will play out," said Woodward. IBM's recently announced PureSystems fits into the engineered system category.

Boris Evelson, an analyst at Forrester, said that whether HANA is the right approach depends on how it is being used. HANA is much more applicable to those cases where business requirements change all the time. That means the queries change frequently as well. HANA is less applicable to stable, status quo environments, he said.

It's also important to recognize whether HANA is solving problems that could be solved in some other way. Typical BI challenges include things like poor data quality, which are problems HANA will not solve, said Evelson.

HANA is also expensive, said Evelson, but it can deliver "solid ROI" if it is being used for the right reasons. It can compress data more efficiently in memory, and users can save time and money by not having to constantly tune and retune queries, he said.

Source: Computerworld

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9227256/For_Univ._of_Kentucky_SAP_s_HANA_is_disruptive_?taxonomyId=18&pageNumber=1

The Cloud's Killer App? SAP's Bid to Own the Enterprise Social Space

If you measure the social activity inside enterprise-class networks, it may look like LinkedIn has a lock on the market. But if you study how employees actually connect with each other every day, Facebook is almost always the platform of choice. But because it's not really geared for businesses, it may be vulnerable to services that address needs tied specifically to the workplace. And SAP - of all companies - feels it may have the keys to the enterprise social space, including a supremely fast database and a way for employees to maintain a social profile based on her or his talents.

"The cloud is the ultimate fabric where all the data resides," says Dinesh Sharma, SAP's vice president for cloud marketing, speaking with ReadWriteWeb, "whether it's data we own, or aggregations of data from other places that all come together through Web APIs - that drives avolume of data. You have access to it, and because applications are so easy to consume, it's a perfect fit for the real-time insights that HANA can produce."

Sharma is outlining a strategy based on the success (which has yet to be proven, of course) of two key factors. One is HANA, which utilizes surprisingly ordinary database management schemes, but whose tables and schemas are arranged in large pools of memory rather than storage devices. That relocation of the proverbial operation table can, statistics indeed show, accelerate certain aspects of database applications by six orders of magnitude.

That's at the cloud end of the SAP strategy spectrum. At the other end - the part that faces the user directly - is SuccessFactors, the human capital management service that SAP acquired last December. If you think of Facebook as the caretaker of people's personal social affairs, consider SuccessFactors (along with competitors like talent management service Taleo, recently acquired by Oracle) as competing to be the caretaker of their personal business portfolios, their onlinecurriculum vitae. 

Now that Monster.com's development appears to have calcified, LinkedIn has pointed the way toward the need for people to not only build but demonstrate their skills, using tools that go way beyond resumes. SuccessFactors is designed to be mined by talent scouts, looking not just for folks whose work history contains key phrases, but for opportunities to build the skill sets of interested and interesting people into the perfect fit for key positions long-term. (By "long-term," I mean longer than six months.)

Picture if you will a talent management worker in the human resources department of a major enterprise. On her tablet is a tool that would let her search for multiple people throughout the workforce who would be best suited to work together as a team on a collective project, sorted in order by their estimated availability and proximity to the place of business. The tool would have to judge these workers' interest and attitudes based on such factors as what they tweet, what products they've liked on Facebook and what tech news stories they've commented on. Even with the best database management schemes in the world, it would be quite a considerable query, consuming tremendous resources and time.

It's the sort of job that could use being accelerated by six orders of magnitude. And there you see the connection.

SAP's Sharma points out that the common usage model for applications preferred by folks in college or emerging from it today is tremendously different from the usage model of 2000 - the key difference being the social component. Any new functionality delivered to that customer - the ones entering the workforce with the skills that talent managers want most - must be geared toward interoperability and shareability. It cannot sit on a hard drive.

"If you're a major company, you probably run your infrastructure on SAP already today. We're providing these applications with these capabilities, and then also giving a level of openness so that you add them at a time and pace of your choosing," says Sharma. "It's not monolithic... Monolithic applications, even those in the cloud, start to morph toward a collection of thousands of services, that are pulled together on an as-needed basis to solve one problem, but then combine in a different way to solve a different problem.  It's an intriguing option."

Source:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2012/05/the-clouds-killer-app-saps-bid-to-own-the-enterprise-social-space.php

SAP bets on data management offering to beat rival Oracle

 

Technology major SAP has unveiled a strategy based on its HANA platform, which can crunch data in real time, to compete against rival enterprise software provider Oracle's hard-disk based database software.

In a big push into the enterprises databases segment, SAP is going to market with its HANA database, Sybase mobile technologies and integrating it with its bread and butter ERP offerings.

With this, SAP has now launched a new data management offering that helps companies in retail, utilities, financial services and others make informed decisions based on real time data.

INDIA-FOCUSED

Currently, SAP is the fourth largest database provider after Oracle, IBM and Microsoft. Further, the company is of the opinion that its HANA database platform is designed keeping in mind challenges faced by Indian enterprises.

“Our HANA database platform has an affinity to high-growth markets like India,” said Mr Steve Lucas, VP and GM, database and technology, SAP.

According to SAP officials, Maharashtra State Electricity Distribution Co (MSED), Abhijeet Power Ltd, Bhavnagar Energy Company, Sanghvi Foods, Usha and Asian Paints are some of its customers who are in the process of adapting HANA.

Interestingly, the company said that some of these customers have shifted from using Oracle.

“We are able to run our internal reports faster and can use data to make informed decisions in our go-to market strategies,” said Mr Subodh Dubey, Group CIO at Usha. The total cost of ownership of SAP solutions are lower than that of Oracle, SAP executives said.

The company plans to grow its R&D centre in India but did not give out details on its hiring plans.

According to Gartner, the enterprise software market in India is projected to grow 13 per cent in 2012, with revenues of $3.22 billion. By 2016, India's share of the software market in Asia/Pacific is expected to reach 12.1 per cent, representing $5.4 billion in revenue, or 1.5 per cent of total worldwide software market revenue of $361 billion.

Source:

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/industry-and-economy/info-tech/article3470062.ece?homepage=true&ref=wl_home

SAP Bids to Become “Facebook of Enterprise”

When enterprise employees connect, the businesslike LinkedIn is the obvious forum for social activity. In reality, however, Facebook is the most popular platform even though it is not really geared for business, which makes it vulnerable to a more effective competitor.

In an interview with ReadWriteWeb, SAP’s vice president for cloud marketing, Dinesh Sharma, postulates the intriguing idea that his company through the cloud could be the one to grab the enterprise social function. The strategy is based on two main factors.

The first is SAP’s HANA which shifts processing into memory, massively accelerating the way multiple data sources can be queried. The other is SuccessFactors, acquired last December, which organizes peoples’ career portfolios online.

Picture if you will a talent management worker in the human resources department of a major enterprise. On her tablet is a tool that would let her search for multiple people throughout the workforce who would be best suited to work together as a team on a collective project, sorted in order by their estimated availability and proximity to the place of business. The tool would have to judge these workers’ interest and attitudes based on such factors as what they tweet, what products they’ve liked on Facebook and what tech news stories they’ve commented on. Even with the best database management schemes in the world, it would be quite a considerable query, consuming tremendous resources and time.

HANA, however, could cope claims Mr. Sharma.

SAP’s Sharma points out that the common usage model for applications preferred by folks in college or emerging from it today is tremendously different from the usage model of 2000—the key difference being the social component. Any new functionality delivered to that customer—the ones entering the workforce with the skills that talent managers want most—must be geared toward interoperability and shareability. It cannot sit on a hard drive.


Source: WSJ


http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2012/05/30/sap-bids-to-become-facebook-of-enterprise/?mod=google_news_blog