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The SAP HANA Blog – SAP HANA by any other name…

Following the conversations taking place on Twitter and blogs, it sounds like there are a lot of questions regarding the branding and naming of SAP HANA. So, in this post I’d like to try to clarify the different offerings related to the SAP HANA™ platform, especially in light of our availability announcement.

As you know, SAP HANA had been under ramp up since Nov 30th and was released into general availability (GA) on June 20th. In this ramp-up phase, it is common to test any product with limited number of early adopters to “work” on all product issues before “scaling” to all customers. While, it’s very important to listen to customers, partners and employees for product feedback, it’s equally important to observe how the product/technology is used and how stakeholders perceive its positioning.

I was personally involved in over 25 customer conversations and deployments during this period. We observed and heard the following feedback loud and clear from all stakeholders:

  • Customers and SAP developers were starting to deploy the SAP HANA appliance for more than analytics within their SAP Business Suite environment – they were utilizing SAP HANA as a platform to build totally new analytical applications. Based on these use cases, SAP announced an application road map with SAP HANA as the platform. So, SAP HANA evolved very quickly from a high-performance analytical appliance to a “platform” for real-time analytics AND applications.
  • SAP HANA represents dramatic simplification in IT landscapes. Its branding and naming needs to be simple as well in customer, partner and social conversations (think in 140 characters or less!). In-memory computing technology is our breakthrough technical approach, and SAP HANA is our product brand name.

Hence, with general availability, we’ve learned and simplified the positioning and branding.

SAP HANA is a platform. Deployment models are the SAP HANA appliance (GA now from selected partners) for on-premise and the SAP HANA application cloud (in private beta now) for on-demand deployment. Running on the SAP HANA platform are real-time analytics and real-time applications. Applications built on the SAP HANA platform will be designated “powered by SAP HANA” (did I just announce an ISV program by saying that?). The SAP HANA platform consists of the SAP HANA database, which is based on our breakthrough SAP in-memory computing technology, plus other components (data services, calculation engine, replication server, etc).

With this, we will no longer use the following names

  • SAP High-Performance Analytic Appliance or SAP In-Memory Appliance – simply use “SAP HANA” and, depending on deployment, you may say SAP HANA appliance or SAP HANA application cloud
  • SAP In-Memory Computing Engine (SAP ICE) – simply use SAP HANA database
  • Please also note that “SAP HANA” does not get further spelled out (is not an abbreviation of an expanded name) anymore.

Source: sap.com

Chris Bongard

July 9th, 2011 View my profile

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