Hi, my name is Bradley Knapp and I am a product manager here at IBM. I own all of our SAP-certified
infrastructure that runs on IBM cloud, and one of the questions that we get a lot from
people who are at the very beginning of their SAP journey is: What is SAP HANA, and why
is it important? You guys talk about it all over the place, but you never tell us what
it is.
SAP HANA is an in-memory database, and HANA is actually an acronym - it stands for "high-performance,
analytical appliance." The idea behind it is that it's a database that is orders-of-magnitude
faster than any traditional database that you can buy that runs on a disk.
Why does that matter? That matters because you have all of these different pieces of
the business solution that are now feeding data back and forth, right? So, you've got
a database that's constantly ingesting data from all these different sources.
You've got all the traditional business sources that you're bringing data in and out of, right?
So that's going to be your contracts and sales data, all of the normal stuff, things that
you've been bringing in and out. But you've also got UX and UI data - you've got information
that's coming into and out of your website, into and out of your forms.
And then you have the proliferation of mobile data. So that data, that's coming out of mobile
devices, not just from your customers, but also from your workforce, right? As our workforce
goes increasingly mobile, you've got more and more information that's coming from those
data sources.
And then you've got all of the machine learning pieces, right? So, what good is data if you're
not gonna do interesting things with it? You've got machine learning that's both reading from
and then writing to that HANA database.
And then you've got the IoT sensors, right? We've got IoT sensors in everything now - you
might have IoT devices in your factory, IoT devices in your warehouses, IoT devices that
your points of presence and points of sale. IoT sensors are everywhere; and you get this
a massive amount of data that's all coming in, and you need a database that's able to
handle it.
That's why HANA exists. HANA is the core of your digital enterprise - it is the core database
that everything feeds into. And why does that matter, right?
So over here, let's talk about S4/HANA. So S4/HANA is the application suite that goes
around it, you know, and so you've got three fairly normal components that go into it.
The first one is gonna be your ERP - the traditional SAP product, the one that everybody knows
about. But you've also got the CRM piece, and you've got an SRM piece; these are all
important components of that S4/HANA deployment.
And then you have the really neat part, right? That's the piece that sits right here in the
middle that is the NetWeaver stack. NetWeaver is an application platform that you can deploy
applications onto that talk back and forth with this HANA database.
So, not only do you have the data sources coming in and out, but now you've got all
the applications that go along with it. So, you've got applications that run on the NetWeaver
platform that come from SAP directly, but also, anyone can develop on top of that NetWeaver
platform, right? A third party, a business partner, a consultant - anybody can develop
an application that's specific to your needs, that goes along with the NetWeaver platform.
And why does all of that matter? Well, what good is data if you aren't going to do things
with it, right? Otherwise, it's just sitting out there - it's data in a warehouse, it doesn't
matter.
That's where we start talking about the analytical pieces, and I like to break the analytics
piece up into three levels. So your first level, that's going to be your tactical level
- that's going to be your business objects. That's a WYSIWYG editor, where any employee
who has got access to the system can go out and put together a query to get the data that
they need to do their job.
The second piece is what I like to consider the enterprise level, right? That's going
to be your machine learning, your Leonardo, your Watson. That's where you're using artificial
intelligence to go out and actually gain important insight into your data that, otherwise, you
might never know about.
And then that third piece is what I like to think of as the strategic level - that's going
to be your digital boardroom. So that's your C-suite and your board of directors that want
the top-down, enterprise-level view of what's going on in your system, what's going on in
your factories. But they want to look at it at the strategic level - I want to see all
of my factories that once, all of my warehouses at once. And then I want to be able to drill
down into: oh, alright, well I see that we've got a little bit of an uptime issue at this
particular factory, or we've got some sort of a hang-up in this warehouse or at this
piece of our inventory system or this piece of our logistics trail. And they can take
and go from that very high level and then start drilling down into it, piece by piece,
so that they can take the insight that they need to make the strategic-level decisions.
So, that's kind of a basic overview of HANA. I want to encourage you to learn more, and
you can always learn more by visiting us on IBM's website. You can learn more at the IBM
Cloud Blog, where we get into more detail around how to architect a solution based around
SAP HANA, based around that HANA database. And also, you can always learn more at SAP's
website at SAP.com.