Avoiding HANA Enterprise Cloud Headaches!

A source told me that one of the largest SAP customers in the (ANZ) region is moving from HANA Enterprise Cloud (HEC) back to an on-premise infrastructure model. Well, this was not surprising for me as I already knew some customers in Europe also moved from HEC to on-premise or other cloud offerings, due to unexpected and unforeseen issues with the HEC model.

I am aware that the majority of the businesses still can’t simply justify the business case for HEC, and it is disappointing to see that some existing customers don’t get the expected business benefits from this model.

A killer app for SAP HANA?

It is almost 18 months since SAP released business suite on HANA. They now claim a little over 1000 customers have jumped aboard – although the number that are running in production is significantly less. This is hardly a ripple on the surface - in fact if we take SAP numbers at face value there are more startups using HANA than Business Suite customers.

HANA is brilliant, HANA is great, yada yada yada, but the adoption rate is pretty underwhelming. And that makes sense because HANA is a platform and no one needs a platform until you have something to run on it. To achieve mass adoption a killer app or, even better, several killer apps are needed.

When the personal computer first appeared last century most people, and especially enterprises, responded with a “meh”. The killer app that drove mass adoption of the personal computer was the spreadsheet. Once the CFO saw that he fell in love and away we went.