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We are a consulting company, and we use SAP HANA mainly to understand and recommend to our customers.
It's an ERP system. Everybody needs an ERP system. You either have SAP HANA, Microsoft Navision, or you need an ERP system to do the accounting, production planning, purchasing, and sales.
SAP HANA has everything, and that is the advantage of SAP because you can get everything in one suite, whatever you need for your company. If it's from finance up to packaging, warehousing, everything is in there. The advantage of SAP HANA is not a special feature; the advantage is that everything is there. It's a complete stack.
They also have analytics features such as real-time analytics, some predictive analysis, and they have Signavio.
SAP has actually too much with SAP HANA. They should rather let others do the specialty works, and SAP wants to do the whole business for themselves. The problem is the price; it's too expensive for what it actually delivers.
The deployment of SAP HANA is far too complicated and takes far too long. The typical implementation time is between six months and two years.
The deployment of SAP HANA is far too complicated and takes far too long. The typical implementation time is between six months and two years.
Unlimited scalability is one of the strengths of SAP HANA.
I hope they are satisfied with SAP technical support, because we do the support. We are the ones who do the support for them.
It's a very big company, and it takes a while until you get real help from them. If it's really urgent, people pay expensive money for the maintenance, but technically speaking, the support is very difficult with every big company.
SAP support would rate a three on a scale from one to ten.
Time to respond to SAP support is an issue, and finding the right person and handling the whole process are problems too.
We can handle most things ourselves. We contact SAP only if it's really in the core and needs fixing.
Neutral
If you're a big concern, if you're a BMW, Volkswagen, or Airbus, then it's fine because that is what you need. But if you're a mid-sized business, then you really should look if the cost is really bringing you a return on investment.
If I compare SAP HANA with Oracle, it's quite similar, although Infor is doing a little bit better. Microsoft is easier to implement, and Odoo, the open-source variation, is the best, but it lacks features. It's more a CRM tool.
On average, the prices for Oracle and SAP HANA are quite the same.
The customers who purchase SAP HANA range from top to the middle because it's so expensive. It is either the higher mid-sized businesses or the big concerns that are using it.
Pricing might be an issue regarding SAP HANA.
Everybody adopts it. If you cannot work with SAP, you're out of the business. Power BI is the most popular one in this context, and SAP itself is selling Signavio, which is their own product, but it's too expensive.
On a scale of one to ten, I rate SAP HANA a seven.
The main use case for SAP HANA is that I mainly support the S/4HANA system, which is SAP's ECC successor to the Enterprise Resource Planning Software. Apart from that, it is used in Business Warehouse, so these are the main uses.
The most valuable SAP HANA features are that, compared to Oracle, there is less administrative work and less complex work to handle, making it very straightforward. The tool itself takes care of the backend work.
The main benefits SAP HANA provides to users include its architecture, which combines both column store and row store capabilities. Some places find the row feature important, whereas others find column store important. It allows some tables to be stored in a column base, others in a row base, and the In-Memory functionalities are mostly the highlight of SAP HANA, especially compared to disk-based memory users. This was the main reason SAP HANA was introduced initially.
Based on my experience, SAP can improve SAP HANA in terms of customer preferences. Many customers still prefer Oracle, possibly due to cost or familiarity, despite SAP mandating that they have to go to SAP HANA. I have recently seen some newer implementations where customers are still happy with their current SAP and Oracle combination, and they are moving to SAP HANA only because their Oracle support will be ending soon.
I have been working with SAP HANA for more than five years.
The initial setup for SAP HANA is simple, too simple.
I would rate the stability of the product at eight because recently we faced some issues in SAP HANA replication. However, I do not believe it is a SAP HANA issue. It could be the tool managing the replication that might be at fault, though we are not sure because the root cause is not yet confirmed. We believe that the issue is likely with the Pacemaker Linux cluster managing the replication, since we recently faced customer data loss during the cluster handover or failover fallback.
The scalability for SAP HANA is generally rated as either a ten or a nine issue.
I would rate technical support from SAP as somewhat unsatisfactory compared to other peers. For instance, when we raise a ticket for AWS or Azure issues, we find their support is very proactive, while SAP's support is quite passive. We often do not know when our ticket will be handled or who is handling it, and we can wait from one to four days for a reply, which is unexpected.
Neutral
When I compare SAP HANA to Oracle, I find that SAP HANA is better and easier to manage. However, Oracle has released a newer version called 19C, which I have never used because now SAP promotes SAP HANA. I see that Oracle is also starting to catch up with Cloud or other new technologies, so in time, they will have additional features that are competitive.
The initial setup for SAP HANA is simple, too simple.
I recommend SAP HANA mainly for large companies. I believe the licensing cost is on the higher side, but for those companies whose performance is crucial, it does not matter as much at the cost of high pricing. Other alternatives might be possible for smaller companies.
I would rate the price for SAP HANA as high.
Real-Time Analytics capabilities in SAP HANA are mostly used by the development team, not as an administrator or support team. I believe Real-Time Analytics is beneficial mostly because of the development team; however, I don't have any exposure to their analytics capabilities.
Regarding analysis and ML features, I do not have experience with predictive analytics.
When it comes to how SAP HANA supports both structured and unstructured data, I am unsure about what is meant by unstructured data. However, I think there are other databases that also support this kind of data. I don't find anything unique in that regard because, for example, Oracle also has File Store or something for PDFs; unstructured data has been common for ages.
I cannot recommend this product to users. I feel that SAP's approach of mandating customers to go with SAP HANA is not a good point; they should make SAP HANA so good that customers willingly choose it. Since SAP HANA was introduced, SAP seems to be forcing a monopoly by not giving options, leading customers to have to choose between staying with SAP or moving away entirely. Thus, I rated it eight out of ten; otherwise, it would have been a ten.
