SAPPHIRENOW 2011 Madrid – A few HANA questions if I may?

I am going to Madrid next week to attend SAPPHIRENOW. SAP is paying for my flight, hotel and admission. As I am preparing for the trip, I thought I will share the questions I am looking to get answers. My understanding at the moment is that HANA will bring in 100M Euros this year. It is quite impressive for a 1.0 product, and SAP deserves kudos for getting customers to buy HANA in a bad economy.

 

So, here are my questions.  I am hoping to get them all answered next week in person, or if I am lucky someone can enlighten me in blog comments here itself.

 

Customer Perspective

1. How many customers are using HANA in production ? So far we know of 2 that were announced at Teched. Will we see a few tens more announced in Madrid?

2. How many customers that did POCs with HANA – the ones shown on stage at SAPPHIRE Orlando, took their POCs to production and are running their business on it?

3. For those that took it to production – how are they dealing with High availability/ Fail over / Disaster Recovery ? What would be really nice is if SAP lets us talk to these pioneering customers directly at Madrid.

4. I saw a tweet from SAP internal IT manager http://twitter.com/#!/MatthiasWild/status/130031370457198592 that SAP internally went live with BW on HANA, but it is just a parallel system to a disk based BW system. This is because of HA/DR . How many customers will buy HANA for BW to run it in parallel? Jeff Word announced two live HANA on BW customers will be present at Madrid. Are they solely on HANA, or are they using another disk based system as primary BW  instance?

 

Applications Perspective

1. Will SAP unveil the killer HANA app in Madrid that makes HANA more compelling than a fast database?

2. How many partner apps have been created during the year on HANA?

3. With HANA supporting R, will statistical processing logic need to be written from scratch in R, or will business functions be available that hides R from developers?

4. Who owns the IP rights if a partner develops a HANA app?

 

Partner Perspective

1. What is SAP’s vision for SI’s in future of HANA ?

2. Is there a market for smaller SI’s in HANA for SMB?

3. Of all the projects in HANA that are going on, what percentage is directly driven by SAP ?

4. Are there benchmarks and testcases for partners to use when implementing HANA solutions? It would also be good to see comparisons between IQ and HANA for same query on a given dataset.

5. Now that SAP has sold a lot of HANA, can we have better sizing tools? We all lived through the pain of incorrect sizing on BW and then BWA. I hope to not repeat this with HANA.

6. I have heard bits and pieces on HANA pricing on BW. Will this be clearly explained at SAPPHIRE Madrid ?

 

Cloud Perspective

1. What is the HANA cloud? does such a thing actually exist today?

2. Is HANA multi-tenant? When I read this http://searchsap.techtarget.com/news/2240106165/McDermott-addresses-questions-over-SAP-BusinessObjects-40-HANA it looks like there is a HANA cloud already that works. Is this true?

3. Does ByD already work on HANA? If not – why and when will it?

4. What is SAP’s solution for ETL to cloud for HANA to get huge volumes of data in real time?

 

Future Perspective

 

1. Where is the money going to come from next year from HANA ?  BW with HANA is a very good next step. BW has 16000 installbase or so. If SAP gets 25% of that to buy HANA at a million dollars each, they will make a significant jump in the size of the company. But how many will buy HANA as DB? BW customers are either really big (maybe top 100 customers) and the rest are usually much smaller.

For the big customers – they will have long term existing licenses from ORCL etc for enterprise which might not be easy to get out of in near future. Also, these tend to have business critical use cases- like for financial close etc. How many of these will jump into HANA as DB when it is so early in maturity curve?  And for really big systems – will they be successful using commercial hardware? Or will they need special hardware built for them? I have not seen yet a comprehensive answer for scale out from SAP.

For smaller customers – the majority – how much of a pain is BW really? Most customers by now would have solved most of their painpoints on performance etc. And even if they have not, will HANA licenses be more cost effective than buying more fusion io cards and RAM / SSD ?

2. When will ECC and rest of business suite run on HANA? And when it happens – will SAP still give customers the choice to have ORCL etc ad DB? As database vendors bring more and more sophistication into their products over time, will there still be enough of a value proposition to have HANA as a DB?

3. What percentage of ECC transactions will benefit directly  from HANA  in terms of real value? Will there be an option to point just these parts of the solution to HANA and rest to disk based DB to optimize cost?

4. Even within a high value analytics use case, not all data needs to be analyzed all the time. So if I have 10 years of data, and I generally go back in time only for 3 years in most queries – will HANA let me store my old data in disk, say in IQ?

 

There you are – and if you have additional questions that you want me to ask SAP while I am in Madrdi, please leave them in  a comment here.