HANA, HANA, HANA, it sounds like a mantra from a Yoga Studio. With all of the hype around SAP HANA, you would think that everyone would know how to get started and leverage out this breakthrough technology. - Not so! There are still many IT experts who spend their time in the trenches that have not had time to poke their heads up from delivering to take in the SAP HANA goodness. What is the value of it? Why should I care? How will this change my environment in the future? All good questions that we have attempted to answer in a 10 week webcast series that had a variety of topics and speakers from across the SAP expert landscape.
This SAP HANA for Enterprise Architects webcast series, brought to you by the ASUG Enterprise Architecture Community and SAP, attempted to provide answers to your questions regarding the impact to your existing SAP enterprise architecture.This epic webcast series was coordinated by Paul Kurchina, ASUG Community Advocate, and had a depth of content not found anywhere else. Top speakers from product management and consulting contributed to the depth and variety that was presented over four months. The intent of which was to bring awareness to the many facets of the SAP HANA technology, the variety of implementation scenarios, and what benefits or value could be realized by implementing it.
© 2015 SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company, image used with permission.
So if you missed any of the presentations, this recap article is intended to give you a single point of reference where you can dive back into the webcasts and come up to speed, all from the point of view of an Enterprise Architect. The 10 webcast summaries below are linked to 10 Blog entries with more details on SCN that have the recordings and slides.
1. SAP HANA for EA’s Kickoff Webcast –The Road to the Perfect Enterprise
Starting off the series was a discussion on the state of business technology and why the conversation around SAP HANA is so relevant today.
SAP believes in the perfect enterprise, one where technology is no longer the constraint to releasing value and where, through a simplified landscape and new real time capabilities, it opens up entirely new business and customer opportunities.
During this webcast, the objective was to provide EAs with some of the business focused themes that will be driving their business executives; the need for business simplicity, agility, and rethinking the business models and processes enabled by real time in memory computing to gain a competitive edge in the market.
2. AP HANA Basics and Fundamentals
This webinar covered SAP HANA basics, what it is and what it is not. In particular, it covered the core technology behind HANA as well as highlighted some of the key differentiating features of the technology, including its ability to handle OLTP and OLAP processing at the same time; the ability to significantly shrink your data footprint and materially increase the transactional throughput. It assumes no prior knowledge of SAP HANA.
3. Migrating to SAP HANA from AnyDB – Tools & Best Practices
This webinar focused on the journey to HANA. In particular it covered how to size HANA based on your existing database footprint and how to migrate existing databases. This included a high level view of best practices SAP employs to help you with this move. It will also give you some ways to look at and demonstrate the TCO of a resulting landscape based on HANA to your business
4. Simple Applications and S/4HANA – A Review and How to Get Started
SAP S/4HANA, the next generation business suite designed to help companies run simple in a digital and networked economy. This new suite is natively built on SAP’s advanced in-memory platform, SAP HANA, and offers a personalized user experience with SAP Fiori. Deployable in the cloud or on-premises, SAP S/4HANA is built to drive instant value across lines of business and industries with the ultimate in sophistication: simplicity.
The webcast featured how current SAP Business Suite (ECC) customers can adopt new S/4HANA capabilities and simplification immediately while building their roadmap to full transition to this next-generation application suite.
5. Extending SAP and Writing Your Own Applications on SAP HANA Cloud Platform
SAP cannot provide everything every customer will ever need through its standard applications. Most customers will also want to extend the standard SAP solutions for their specific business needs. In this webinar, we reviewed how through the HANA Cloud Platform, SAP provides an open, cloud based development platform that can enable you to create your own applications or extend SAP’s. We showed how this can be done quickly and simply and how you can continue to use your favorite development tools to do so.
6. Joining the Pieces Together – SAP HANA Cloud Integration
In a world of cloud, on premise and hybrid landscapes, integration between these components is more important than ever. Many customers will not have everything in the cloud, or may use more than one cloud vendor. Increasingly, some customers are avoiding on-premises altogether. In this webinar we endeavored to help you understand, by focusing on the different approaches needed for each scenario, how SAP can help you live with these landscapes and bring them together in a way that works optimally for your business.
7. SAP HANA and Data Centre Readiness
Data Center Readiness for SAP HANA is a core quality to introduce the brand new SAP In-Memory technology to SAP’s customers. SAP customers are often very ambitious. Especially when it comes to database operations with continuous availability and expect features, which are not usual for other databases outside of the SAP architecture. SAP HANA can fulfill most of these ambitions in a first step, despite being a relatively young product. For Enterprise Architects, they need awareness into different solution scenarios on deploying SAP HANA.
8. Why SAP HANA, Why Now and How?
Most businesses struggle with how the innovations they want and need can be delivered at the same time as a major transformation. Most CIOs struggle with how to balance cost, risk and value of introducing a new technology or innovation, when doing so may risk their service levels they are paid to deliver. In this webinar, we focused on how the HANA platform can help you solve these dilemmas and rethink the transformation journey.
Based on the experiences from and delivered by senior executives from our customers now working for SAP, it provided insight and ways to help you identify and introduce those areas of value most important to your business.
9. Implications of Introducing SAP HANA into Your Environment
SAP HANA is a new technology. Whilst many of the standard practices of IT remain true, HANA fundamentally challenges many of them.
During this webinar we looked at the implications of introducing HANA into the landscape from an IT perspective such as the opportunities for simplification in both the production and also non production landscapes where many customers traditionally have 4-7x the hardware needed for their live systems. We also looked at migration strategies to HANA considering whether the ERP system always needs to be the first port of call.
10. Internet of Things and SAP HANA for Business
The ubiquity of connected devices and sensors is not just going to improve the efficiency of our current business models - it is creating new opportunities. IoT is impacting many areas, from consumer privacy to billing, to simply keeping your core enterprise applications up and running when they get hit with the overwhelming amount of data generated by connected devices. Enterprise Architects can incorporate SAP HANA into their solution sets around IoT, from data capture to value delivery.
To support SCN and to extend out the SAP HANA community, ASUG is pleased to launch a new HANA Platform Program - Join today!
The ASUG HANA Platform Program will focus on providing SAP HANA platform education, customer experience and knowledge sharing both from a business and technical perspective. In addition to HANA customer experiences and implementation stories we will host and highlight technical education to meet the needs of a broad set of SAP HANA Platform user roles. In addition, this program will offer ASUG members an opportunity to engage and influence SAP HANA product teams.
Join today https://www.asug.com/discussions/community/sig_communities/hana