Implementations of in-memory computing solutions have become a part of IT development project plans of many companies. The October meeting of representatives of companies and institutions from the region of Central and Eastern Europe, which was held in Walldorf, was an excellent opportunity to become familiar with SAP HANA capabilities and available solutions. BCC presented its experience with the project and the results of the SAP ERP and SAP BW migration to this platform.
An increasing number of SAP installations running on HANA and positive business results achieved by customers implementing or migrating their systems to the SAP HANA platform encourage more companies to consider investing in this technology.
The benefits that can be achieved – an acceleration of transactions and analytics by a few up to a few thousand times – are tempting especially for those companies that in their SAP system landscape carry out a lot of transactions and process vast amounts of data, and see a chance to gain a competitive advantage in business through obtaining analytical results in real time. It is not possible to achieve the performance levels offered on the SAP HANA infrastructure using traditional technologies.
The opportunity to learn about SAP HANA, available HP hardware solutions, and most of all the experience with completed implementations attracted the guests – representatives of large companies and institutions in Central and Eastern Europe – invited to Baden-Württemberg.
The meeting took place on October 6-7 in Walldorf, where headquarters of SAP AG and HP – event organizers – are located, just a few kilometres from each other. The invited guests were mostly IT managers from Poland, from companies which are either at the stage of analyzing offers for the SAP HANA platform, or that have already completed the first projects of this type, e.g. the implementation of SAP HANA for a data warehouse.
The host of the first day was SAP – an author and producer of the SAP HANA platform. On the second day, the guests were hosted by HP, one of the technology partners providing hardware solutions for SAP HANA.
SAP day
The history, the path leading to the creation of the solution offered currently, its capabilities and plans for the future dominated the presentations by SAP AG representatives.
"The changing face of business", a presentation conducted by Sven Bossenmaier, Head of Database & Technology, Platform Solutions Group, Middle & Eastern Europe, provided examples of SAP HANA implementations for a variety of customers. The case studies focused on the largest, globally operating companies, mainly from the United States. The data mentioned – an acceleration of transactions and analytics by several hundred times – is, as usual in the case of SAP HANA, impressive. However, without a real context (the names of customers using the platform were not provided), it is hard to refer the scale of business from the presented examples to the business environment and systems of the meeting participants.
The presentation by Jakub Żurek, Sales Manager from BCC, the only Polish partner of SAP invited to the meeting, was devoted to a specific example of a migration from a "classic" platform to an in-memory platform. In the mid 2014, BCC successfully completed the migration of SAP ERP and SAP BW to SAP HANA at Sokołów SA. It was one of the first projects of migration to HANA for SAP ERP in the world.
The information about the progress and results of the project implemented in the Polish company, one of the largest meat producers in Poland, was certainly valuable for customers from Central and Eastern Europe. A similar business environment, a scale of the company of comparable size and similar experience with the use and development of SAP systems allowed them to form their own opinion on the solution and made them familiar with the challenges related to the organization of the project.
As Jakub Żurek says: "Participants' questions focused not only on the acceleration of analytics or reporting. They rather concerned specific aspects of the project preparation and management, the organization of work and the conclusions that can be useful for other companies planning to implement or migrate to HANA. Our experience with Sokołów shows the importance of a competent and properly motivated team and support from manufacturers – both SAP and a hardware platform provider".
At the end of the "SAP day" guests were invited to visit the SAP Inspiration Pavilion – an exhibition showing the history of IT and SAP solutions, and primarily focusing on the future and great potential of Big Data solutions.
HP day
HP focused on detailed information about the family of solutions dedicated to SAP HANA. Presentations concerned the possibilities provided in the offer of servers and systems installed on them, including the cooperation with SUSE, a manufacturer of Linux, a system used on the SAP HANA platform. Its representatives were also present at the meeting.
The presentation by HP engineers who created this platform was especially interesting. They presented the history of development of the currently available hardware platforms for SAP HANA. The speakers devoted much attention to the construction of a high-availability architecture. SAP systems are often basic transactional systems of enterprises, requiring a continuous access. For this reason, a big emphasis is put on ensuring the operation continuity and Disaster Tolerance. Due to the fact that the entire database of the SAP system running on the HANA platform is placed in a memory, this is extremely important. The experience with implementations for customers were also presented.
As Jakub Żurek underlines: "With in-memory solutions, the real-time analytics and reporting in an operational memory becomes a reality. This revolution is happening also with the participation of BCC. Now – on the basis of real experience – we can confirm what benefits are brought by the HANA platform in daily business. It is natural that more companies are interested in this technology, and in many of them the decision to implement it has already been made. For those who plan to migrate to SAP HANA in the nearest future, BCC offers a number of possible approaches that can help them better prepare for migration. Firstly, an analysis of the customer's SAP environment carried out by experts on SAP and SAP HANA technology, including the so-called Business Scenario Recommendations. We also propose a test project Proof-of-Concept. Another variant is the performance of tests in our SAP HANA Competence Center – Poland's first hardware and software laboratory for SAP HANA. This allows for the operation of the platform to be tested in the real environment of a particular SAP system".
