HANA in the Cloud: Raising expectations?

SAPs announcement that it is to be giving its customers the option of running their applications on top of a cloud-based version of its HANA in-memory database technology, certainly raised a lot of media and analyst interest.

Analyst house Forrester highlighted the fact that the open nature of the technology means that that customers could run any SAP application on the HANA cloud and connect it to the HANA database. While V3 reported IDCs view that HANA was made for the cloud , as it will require less capital and less space in customers data centres. IDC went on to comment that, while there has been no news yet on pricing, the subscription service is likely to be far cheaper than trying to deploy HANA on premise. The general consensus was that the announcement was a positive step forward for SAP.

However, Helena Schwenk, analyst for MWD Advisors, had a few words of warning. She commented that while there are obvious benefits to SAP customers in terms of allowing them to turbo charge their SAP environments, they still need to be wary of the cost and effort associated with subscribing to the cloud service. Users will need to factor in the time, effort and cost of migrating and on-boarding SAP HANA on the enterprise cloud, since SAP is employing a bring-your-own license model.

There will undoubtedly be a lot more chatter about HANA and the cloud over the coming months. So stay tuned to the User Group blog to keep abreast of the latest developments.