The evolution of HANA One: More than just HANA hosted in a public cloud

[richard_hirsch]

A recent article in Sap Insider about HANA One entitled “SAP HANA One Illuminates New Possibilities” has some interesting details about how the platform may evolve in the future. I didn’t see any analysis or resonance about the article or Greg’s blog about the topic, so I thought it would be useful to surface the material. 

The article by Swapan Saha, Greg Chase, and Sapan Panigrahi first provides background information about the platform but the article’s conclusion is the most relevant for those interested in the broader HANA Cloud platform.

SAP HANA One continues to evolve at a rapid pace, updating at least quarterly to include functionality from new versions of SAP HANA software and datasets. Planned future updates will include SAP HANA support package stack 6, as well as templates and adapters for scenarios that may include:

• MySQL application data connectors
• Elastic turbo-charging of specific SAP ERP business processes
• Public sector-specific applications, such as healthcare fraud detection and education
• Powerful bundled server-side business intelligence tools

POV

Although the authors preface their statement with “may include” instead of “will include”, the most important development is that HANA One is evolving into something more than just a version of HANA hosted in public clouds.  Content in the form of templates and adapters – hopefully just available on HANA One – will help distinguish the product from other HANA-based offers from SAP as well as competitive products.

What is curious is that the usage scenarios mentioned by the article ("Small projects, Starter projects, Temporary projects") might not be the ideal fit for the new functionality mentioned in the article's conclusion. My feeling is that these new features might be a better fit with other usage scenarios.

HANA One plays a central role in SAP’s startup-related activities yet much of this marketing attention is focused on the price of the product.

The SAP execs repeatedly talked up HANA ONE, which runs on Amazon Web Services, as if to say “this isn’t the traditional, big iron, expensive SAP” of another era. It costs $3.49 per hour to run HANA ONE on an AWS EC2 8-core cluster. [SOURCE]

The new content / functionality in HANA One described in the article should provide content that is especially relevant to startups. The bundling of specific applications / templates could help such companies move more rapidly into the enterprise space.  This would provide additional incentive that they choose HANA One as their platform of choice.