Throwing down the gauntlet: Gartner on HANA

While SAP's HANA-based architecture will force competitors to show their hands on their application infrastructure strategies, selling its most conservative customers on the potentially disruptive impact of its HANA-led architecture will be a key challenge ahead, according to a new Gartner report.

The report, titled 'SAP Throws Down the Next Generation Architecture Gauntlet with HANA', discusses SAP's long-term application infrastructure strategy, based on in-memory computing, mobility and cloud.

"This initiative is a bold attempt to effect a generational change for the company, and to allow it to compete with industry and thought-leading architectures. The vision is very ambitious, and, at the same time, consistent with users' aspirations," the report said. "SAP's vision will force megavendor competitors to respond by clearly and openly articulating their cloud and in-memory computing strategies."  

However, Gartner also highlighted the hurdles ahead for SAP in making its new strategy a success.

"In addition to addressing formidable technology and go-to-market challenges, SAP will have to introduce its highly innovative vision in a way that will be acceptable to the most conservative part of its customer base."

Despite these challenges, the report indicated that the HANA architecture "likely will have a significant industry impact", and recommended that SAP clients should plan for a migration of their NetWeaver-based applications to HANA within the next three to five years. It also recommended that users should adopt HANA technology for high-return or fast ROI projects or for non business critical applications, particularly those involving analytics.

On the report, SAP co-founder and chairman of the SAP Supervisory Board, Dr Hasso Plattner said, “Just as in the days of SAP R/2 and later in 1992 with SAP R/3, it is great to see that Gartner has taken the time to evaluate our SAP HANA-based architecture for the benefit of our customers. We believe this is a strong affirmation of our timeless software-based strategy of bringing non-disruptive innovation to our customers.”
 

“SAP HANA is pivotal to helping enterprises achieve massive simplification, renewal and true real-time performance and scale without disruption,” said Dr Vishal Sikka, member of the SAP Executive Board, Technology and Innovation. “SAP’s continued strong performance reflects how we are delivering on our vision of bringing this innovation to renew our platforms and our entire product portfolio, as well as how we are co-innovating with our customers on entirely new frontiers — all without disruption.”

 

 

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