What next for SAP HANA?

It was once hailed by SAP CEO Bill McDermott as the vendor’s “biggest launch in 23 years, if not in the entire history of the company” – but as a raft of high-profile employees have been let go in recent weeks, we ask: has HANA lost its lustre at the German company?

Earlier this year the company announced it would be going through a major restructure, with McDermott telling the Wall Street Journal that 4,400 jobs will be affected. The overall aim was to better focus on “strategic growth areas” in the words of CFO Luka Mucic.

Since then there have been some high profile exits. Long-time CTO Bernd Leukert parted ways with the company in February, issuing a statement that read: “I am very proud to have been a member of the SAP Executive Board and to have launched the most groundbreaking innovation in our industry, SAP S/4HANA.

“I sincerely thank Hasso Plattner and the Supervisory Board for their trust and support for many years.”

Ken Tsai, who headed up global product marketing for a raft of SAP products, including SAP HANA, is now working at Adobe, and both Thomas Jung and Rich Heilman publicly announced they were laid off earlier this month, having both worked on HANA for the best part of this decade. The HANA development teams in Germany and Korea appear to have avoided the brunt of these layoffs, however.

As Den Howlett at Diginomica put it in his analysis of the layoffs: “If you understand anything about development it is that it is often a very few geniuses who make software sing. In this case, Jung and Heilman are those geniuses. I know that from personal experience.

“What’s more important is that Jung and Heilman are the two people who could reliably help sales close out deals by explaining to technical leads what needs to be done in HANA environments. They developed and led masterclasses all over the world. They understand SAP HANA end-to-end. They also commanded deep respect among the SAP developer community.”

Some took to popular site The Layoff, mostly anonymously, to vent their frustration with the moves. “SAP’s Engineering Culture died this week. Full stop. Period,” someone wrote on the forum. Renald Wittwer, a freelancer who has worked with SAP tweeted at the CEO: “@BillRMcDermott What are you doing? This cut is to deep, into the muscle of SAP”.

What next for HANA?

The common theme here is HANA, which was first release in 2010 promising a fundamentally different data store to your classic relational database. It runs in-memory, meaning data is stored in columns instead of rows, allowing for faster, near to real-time analytics and compute capabilities and it underpins SAP’s latest and greatest enterprise resource planning (ERP) software S/4HANA as well as its next generation CRM offering, C/4HANA.

The truth is, SAP has long struggled to clearly get across what HANA is, and why customers should shift their precious enterprise data to this new data store.

Speaking to Computerworld UK back in 2015, during the SAP Insider tour in Nice, SAP’s cross platform product marketing vice president Matthias Haendly admitted: “There is confusion over HANA, and we can always do more to explain what exactly each one can do for you.”

With the loss of these architects of HANA it is fair to question the future direction of that product, with the tea leaves suggesting that SAP is focusing on HANA as the underpinning technology to its SaaS applications, rather than as a standalone database technology.

This strategy certainly makes sense as the powerful cloud vendors have increasingly commoditised the technology, with Amazon, Microsoft and Google either developing their own in-memory data solutions, like ElastiCache, or partnering with Redis for something like Google’s Cloud Memorystore.

It also fits with SAP’s recent M&A focus on SaaS companies and a marketing focus on SaaS versions of its own solutions, like S/4 and C/4.

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