When is SAP HANA right for you?

If you’re reading this blog, SAP HANA has caught your attention. By now, you’ve probably heard a significant amount about SAP HANA. It’s the next-generation platform with blazing speed, real-time reporting, and powerful analytics, able to capitalize on unprecedented opportunities and deliver significant competitive advantages. As the SAP HANA topic has matured, you’ve probably also heard of different ways to deploy it in your business; solutions such as SAP Business Suite accelerators, SAP HANA applications, SAP BW on HANA, SAP Business Suite on HANA, and more.

You’ve possibly heard so much in fact that you feel the need to take a step back and ask – so what does it all mean to me? It’s fast – great. It can help me – fine. But, where do I start, and how do I take advantage of it? Do accelerators help me? Should I start with SAP BW on SAP HANA? Does the introduction of SAP Business Suite on SAP HANA now change everything? Like other break-through innovations, SAP HANA on its own will not deliver value.

But, SAP HANA applied to a particular business problem or challenge can deliver exceptional value. So, if you still have some questions about whether SAP HANA is right for you, or more importantly, how it’s right for you, then read on to determine how best to realize value from SAP HANA.

When evaluating SAP HANA for your business, remember to keep the following in mind: (1) how can HANA help my business? (2) what type of HANA solution do I need to achieve this? (3) how should I plan my deployment strategy? These high level concepts are summarized below in Figure 1, as well as further examined in the text which follows.

1. Understanding Value Opportunities in Your Business: before deploying SAP HANA, an organization should take the time to understand where SAP HANA can deliver maximum benefit based on your business goals. Some examples to consider:

a.Are analytics a problem in your organization? Do you have plans to grow the business, but need to stay lean in terms of your total operations? Would access to real-time information allow you to accomplish that more economically? Are you an SAP BW customer, looking to improve the way you deploy your analytics today?

b.What about your day-to-day business processes? If you could run your materials planning processes faster or differently, would that change your business? For Consumer Products, do you have access into the real-time demand in your various markets, allowing you to focus on the right ones? For Retail, could you grow customer loyalty and in-store excellence through access to customer data by your sales personnel while your customers are still in the store?

c.Finally, are there new business processes you could create today, something that could transform your business but you haven’t thought about doing because of technical limitations? Could a new application be developed, purpose-built to bring these new ideas to reality? For Healthcare, is there a way to manage patient data, allowing you to better serve patients or deliver medical care.

2. Map Value Opportunities to SAP HANA Solutions: once an organization understands the business value – how SAP HANA can enable business solutions – you next need to understand how to implement SAP HANA. As identified in the opening to this blog, SAP continues to enhance HANA and offer additional capabilities.

Business Story: Managing the Sweet Business of Sugar with SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud

From a teaspoon or two in our morning coffee to that oh-so-decadent desert covered in chocolate and caramel, we certainly love our sugar. So consider this: The world consumes more than 165 million tons of sugar each year, according to estimates. That’s an average of about 23 kilograms (roughly 50 pounds) for every man, woman and child on the planet.

No doubt about it, sugar is big business
In the United States, the Florida Crystals Corporation is a giant of the sugar industry. Headquartered in West Palm Beach, it is a privately owned, vertically integrated operation that takes sugar all the way from the cane field to the store shelf. It farms some 185,000 acres in Florida, where it also owns two sugar mills, a sugar refinery, a packaging and distribution center, a rice mill and what is arguably the largest renewable power plant in North America.

In recent years, the company has grown far beyond the Sunshine State. Acquisitions and global expansion have made Florida Crystals the world’s largest sugar refiner, with an annual production capacity of around 7 million tons. Florida Crystals and its subsidiaries deliver some of the best-known brand names in the business: Domino, Jack Frost, C&H, Redpath and Tate & Lyle.

All this might sound like a pretty sweet deal, but this kind of success only happens when your current operations run smoothly and your future vision stays clear. And these days, Florida Crystals is harvesting a bumper crop of both business efficiencies and clarity.

Recipe for Success
That’s because Florida Crystals uses SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud service to power a full stack of SAP ERP application software for everything from finance and materials management to sales and distribution, as the company’s Vice President and CIO Don Whittington described in a recent SAP video. Florida Crystals is speeding up core business processes and getting information faster than ever before from across its extensive supply chain. As a result, the company is providing faster response and delivery to its customers.

SAP HANA represents “a new frontier,” Whittington stated, and the business agility it enables is both liberating and extremely empowering.

“Our workforce can move from transactional to analytical,” Whittington said. “When your day is no longer spent running transactions, you have time to take the results of those transactions and use that to a business advantage.”

And Florida Crystals can do it all with the speed and breadth of analysis made possible by SAP HANA.

Sweet Leftovers
The company is also changing the sugar industry in ways that might affect all of us.

Florida Crystals is already using leftover sugar cane fiber to produce clean, environmentally-friendly electricity that powers the company’s sugar operations, as well as 60,000 Florida homes. The company is also partnering with leading universities to develop cellulosic ethanol from sugar cane after the sucrose juice has been extracted.

So, no need to choose between food and fuel. That’s good because millions of us look forward to taking our morning coffee just the way we like it. For me, that’s with one and a half teaspoons of sugar, please. 

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Free access to SAP HANA Sandbox for your first HANA experience

If you have been looking for getting access to SAP HANA Check out this article…

If you have been looking for getting access to SAP HANA to explore it Hands on.

This article would provide you necessary help to build your first data model in SAP HANA.

1. HOW TO GET FREE ACCESS TO SAP HANA

SAP has provided the HANA Sandbox System to learning purpose. You can register yourself  at  http://scn.sap.com/community/developer-center/hana   to request for your access.

You can also evaluate HANA One developer edition available on Amazon Cloud with nominal AWS hosting charges.

You can also try out few demos provided to get a feel of SAP HANA

2. YOUR FIRST EXERCISE IN SAP HANA. ( For Developers )

If you are an absolute beginner in HANA just like me, you can start with the first exercise

You can look for EIM162 Pdf :

Download

EIM162 Exercises EIM162 Slides

3. WANT TO GET YOURSELF CERTIFIED IN HANA ? –  C_HANAIMP_10

SAP has also introduced certification for associate level for SAP HANA lately. Find the below link for more details.

Certification Details

Now what else are are you waiting for Go ahead and get yourself HANAfied..

Drop me any comments if you are looking for any specific detail.

What is SAP HANA ?

In this article we will look at SAP HANA which is the most talked about product of SAP after its realased to customers on Dec 2010.

SAP’s High-Performance Analytic Appliance(HANA) exploits the advantages of In-Memory Computing that allows the processing of massive quantities of real time data in the main memory of the server to provide immediate results from analyses and transactions by combining SAP software components optimized on hardware provided and delivered by SAP leading hardware partners.

Reminds me of movie “3 Idiots” . Perfect definition to score 10/10 in any exam or interview. 

Lets make it a little simple.

SAP HANA is a combination of hardware and software specifically made to process massive real time data using In-Memory computing

We managed to get a sneak peak of HANA hardware in Teched 10 at Bangalore.

Need of SAP HANA:

Quoting  Vishal Sikka “ If a business asks a question and gets the answer after 3 days probably one would even forget what was the question was after 3 days. “

So one of the key challenges IT is facing now is not only the capability to extract reports on huge amount of real time data which keeps growing in a exponential rate and from different sources but also analyzing it in different perspectives, that too in seconds.

Most of the Official SAP presentation refers to a popular term in Finance “ TED Spread “ , for explaining it , which is a measure of credit risk for inter-banking lending.

Aftermath of the Lehman bankruptcy, TED Spread hit a record spread of 465 basis points. That magnitude of spread indicated a virtual shut down in interbank lending. All financial organizations use the TED spread as an indication of easing or tightening credit markets.

It might be a little difficult to digest it in the first go and since I am not a Finance guy so probably you can Google around to find more about TED Spread.

Summarizing the whole thing in a single sentence would be that every organization needs to make better decisions faster not only on real time data but Real real time data which keeps growing in a exponential rate and from different sources almost instantly.

When I say real real Time Data for a retail shop perspective the POS (Point of sale) data would be available for analytics even before the customer leaves the retail store.

Motivation for Architecture of SAP HANA

Most of the chip maker companies have been focusing on building multiple core as there is limitation on increasing the Clock Speed as  the more is the Clock Speed the more heat it emits while processing which results in expensive ways to control the temperature. If you observe the last decade the Clock Speed has not made any impressive change.

2002                                                         2006                                                         2010

Cores/CPU -   1 Core                                      4 Cores                                                                 8 Cores

Clock Speed – 1.8 GHz                                   1.6- 3GHz                                                             2.26 GHz

Software has always been made for the Hardware which these Top chip makers design.

There is always a need to build Software which can fully exploit the capabilities of the Hardware design.

So let’s have a look on both hardware and software features one by one.

HARDWARE DESIGN:

Huge amount of data is divided into multiple sets which are then crunched separately by the Blades as shown below.

Pic : Data is divided into 4 blades with 2 standby blades

The Blades are composed of multiple CPU’s per blade and each CPU has multiple cores per CPU.

This means if you say for example 8 cores per CPU and 4 such CPU’s per blade. So mere 4 Blades will have 128 cores crunching data in parallel.

SOFTWARE DESIGN:

HANA stores data in Column wise for fast computing. The below diagram compares, how data is stored row wise and column wise.

For example: If system wants to find aggregate of the second column i.e. 10+35+2+40+12.

In Row wise: The system has to jump memory address to collect subsequent values for aggregation.

That is data records are available as complete tuples in one read which makes accessing of few attributes expensive operation.

In Column wise: A single scan would fetch the results much faster.

HOW IT WORKS:

SAP HANA can be used without disturbing our current IT landscape. In the above diagram show that data in the database can be replicated near real time into HANA and can be used for reporting with a number of BI tools directly sitting on the top of the HANA.

Why do you need SAP HANA ?

This article talks about various factors which leads to birth of power full and real time computing appliance –> SAP HANA !!!

What is the need of SAP HANA?
95% people will say Dude its faster that’s why we need it.
But it’s more than that. Let me tell you one real time example: currently there are three “V” any business solution needs to fight with: Volume, varieties and Velocity.

1.Volume ( Information Explosion )

Many years back when you had 1GB pen drive in your hand you were walking like a King!! But those golden days are gone now.
In an organization every year massive amounts of data is created and how fast your business reacts to important information determines whether you succeed or fail. This is a big problem and its getting bigger.
Few Facts about it :

• IDC estimates that worldwide digital content added up to 487 billion gigabytes in 2009. They predict this will double in 18 months, and every 18 months thereafter.

• In a Sloan Management survey in 2010 60% of executives said their companies have more data than they know how to use effectively. With data doubling every 18 months, that percentage is going to keep growing.

• According to EMC, by the end of 2011 there was 1.8 Zeta byte of digital data.

And if you forgot the size units this “V” (Volume) will remind you that:

2.Varieties ( ‘Consumerization’ of IT )

Human is the most unsatisfied, indecisive and unpredictable animal. So the business application needs to be capable enough to handle these ‘Consumerizations’.
Customers expect business experience to be as satisfying as personal experience.

3. Velocity (Speed)
People want instant access to information – ‘in the moment’’ – whether that is a moment of risk or a moment of opportunity. If the moment has passed and your business has not taken the right action, it has failed. People want instant answers. They want them to be right. They want them anywhere, any time.

So to fight with these three “V”: Volume, Varieties and Velocity (A way to process and analyze massive amounts of data in real time.) SAP HANA is born!!!!!
Below image explains the role of HANA.

That is the role of SAP HANA. Using groundbreaking in-memory hardware and software we can
manage data at massive scale, analyze it at amazing speed, and give the business not only instant access to real time transactional information and analysis but also more flexibility. Flexibility to analyze new types of data in different ways, without creating custom data warehouses and data marts. Even the flexibility to build new applications which were not possible before.