Item: SAP HANA Cloud
Rating: 8
Author: Adithya Kambampati

Overall Satisfaction with SAP HANA

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We were working on a supply chain project for a customer where we have build applications on top of the data that is dependent on SAP, as well as a third-party application. 3rd party application data varies quite frequently, which has a huge set of master data and can be accessed via files. We brought this data to SAP HANA on a cloud platform, which gave us access to unify data coming from ECC and 3rd party. It also provided the capability to server better user experience for accessing this data via Fiori applications.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Ability to access SAP and non SAP data at one place.
Performance
Data level access with the help access control.

Cons

Multiple versions of HANA.
Unique and Nice to see Container concepts like HDI, but there's a learning curve.
Sometimes unable to understand best practices when looking at performance.

Return on Investment

Speed of development
Data storage and access
Real time data availability

SAP HANA Real-Time Processing

Real-time data availability of both SAP and Non-SAP is one of the biggest benefits. Our application displays the prices from different suppliers that are needed coming from the 3rd party application. Availability of this data based on the Geo search and having it in a real-time was a big plus.

SAP HANA Data Type Support

Most of the data is simple relational data. However, hierarchical information was there to a certain extent. But, we do not have a need for other data type support.

SAP HANA Complex Business Logic

Not applicable

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft SQL Server

The customer has most of their investment in Microsoft databases. If SAP HANA was not available, we would have gone to getting data into a SQL server and creating APIs to access them inside SAP. But, with the help of HANA, we could avoid all those unnecessary things and get them straight into one database and create applications.

Support Rating

We really did not see any major concerns from the support point of view. Since we are an on-cloud platform, we get frequent updates and we have additional tasks that we have to take care of frequently to get things up-to-date.

Key Insights

Do you think SAP HANA Cloud delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with SAP HANA Cloud's feature set?

Yes

Did SAP HANA Cloud live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of SAP HANA Cloud go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy SAP HANA Cloud again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

For our use case, we would confidently say SAP HANA was the best-suited approach, as it simplifies the process in consuming SAP and Non-SAP data for applications. However, modeling is very important in HANA. If you are looking at scenarios like storing the images, then this might not be a good choice. We do have to store multiple images for each material for our application provided by the 3rd party that we are leveraging a document storage solution for, but we did tie the links into our HANA data. Similarly, if you are looking for a time-series database I probably would not recommend this too, instead, look for something like Influx or Prometheus.

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