If anyone had any doubts, it became crystal clear: the future of SAP Innovation will be driven by SAP HANA.
With SPS07 HANA has really became a mature platform in terms of datacenter integration options, and all the innovation driven by the possibilities it brings to business, make a overwhelmingly compelling case for companies to start adopting HANA within their datacenter portfolio.
So, I truly believe the question today is not on "whether companies will adopt HANA" but more a matter of "how and when" will companies bring HANA into their datacenter portfolios.
A couple of things caught my attention, and let me share those with you.
First the affirmation that HANA and Fiori will represent the full reinvention of SAP applications. The level of possibilities offered by HANA together with the user experience improvement offered by Fiori will completely reshape SAP applications as we know them today, so every day customers wait to start this journey, will represent more time without seizing the benefits this simplification could be bringing to their organizations.
The next one is that SAP is very serious about cloud. What I got is that SAP is playing on the full front: IaaS, PaaS, SaaS as well as making all these 3 models work on a fully public model, on a fully private model as well as on a hybrid cloud model. I understood that on the IaaS and PaaS spaces SAP is opening for the partner community to contribute, and considering the dramatic reductions of data footprints being observed (one example showed a 10TB BW coming to a 800GB database on HANA), running some of these applications fully virtualized (using virtualization technologies like VMware), will bring the benefit of flexibility, enabling customers to operate not only on a Hybrid Cloud Model, but most of all, giving customers the flexibility of changing providers and moving between multiple PaaS and IaaS providers. Working on a hybrid model with some components subscribed as IaaS, others as PaaS and others as well as SaaS will definitely be a possible model going forward, enabling each customer to chose the right option for him, based on his strategic, financial, security/compliance and technical constraints. These are exciting times full of possibilities!
And the third topic I would like to highlight is how HANA platform and the Fiori user experience are enabling the transformation both of business models, as well user productivity. The example of s-Fin and the "Big Washroom Data" really provoke users and business decision makers to start thinking on a "what if" perspective, and start disrupting their own business to enable them to leap forward on this new hyper connected world. Getting the information to the fingertips of business users, enable them to manipulate and analyze it on the fly, along side with the possibility to integrate in real time "machine data" and act upon it in real time, open possibilities up until now unavailable to SAP customers.
These are exciting times for all of us technologists working on the SAP world, and more than ever, skill sets that span technologies, and bridge business as IT, also connecting multiple technology disciplines to get them all working together will for sure see increased demand, as on this new world, a silo view won't do it anymore.
Stay tuned for more news and perspectives coming from my learning at this SAP TechEd && d-Code 2014 in Berlin.
