SAP HANA Reviews

We use this solution for our CRM, and for our ERP, inventory, and supply chain management. It's basically used to run the majority of the company. We are customers of SAP HANA and I'm an account executive. 

SAP is great for what it does. There are likely better solutions out there but I'm not aware of them. It's a solution for big companies and in that sense it makes management of the databases much easier for higher-level people to know what's going on. 

The user interface and CRM need to be more user-friendly, it's abnormally painful. I'm a frontline user of the CRM, and it requires lots of clicks that are unnecessary. Less is more on the internet and quite often I'm clicking five, six, seven times to get where I need, and that's not effective. When an item in a certain category is not done properly, it can either lock up a system or not complete the process. We see it on a daily basis and we have to figure out a workaround to solve it. It's a technical issue that SAP's had since the beginning, and it hasn't yet been solved. With SAP everything has to be categorized. If it's not, it causes system issues and then you have to decipher the issue to try and undo it. It's an algorithm argument flaw. In the near future, I'd like to see better user interfaces and better connectors between modules.

I've been using this solution for about eight years. 

The solution is rock stable now. We have an SAP team and five or six people fixing day-to-day issues with up to 30 people working on it all the time. There is an additional team that implements new functionalities. 

It can scale infinitely. We have 12,000 users internationally and we use the product extensively. 

I have previously used Salesforce and I don't like it. It runs like a 1980s webpage in the current era.

The initial setup was painful and required a lot of work. Systems would go down all the time because there were initial errors with the SAP system. but once it was up and stabilized, things were good. It still has flaws but it's a good solution as a whole. They've implemented extra modules from SAP. If you don't implement it properly you'll feel the pain. It probably took around six months to solve all the issues because SAP is so big and so integrated and so integral, it can take a while to fix the problems. You can limp along until things are solved and find workarounds, but it takes a lot of effort. SAP helped us with the implementation. 

SAP is expensive but it's a good solution for what it does. You're going to get a $20 answer, for a $20 product. For all the functionality it offers, the cost is worth it.

It's important to plan and then plan again before implementing. If you don't plan properly, you will fail. The solution requires planning the implementation, making sure your company is the right size for the product. If you're an SMB, this might not be the right product for you. It might cost you more than you think. If you're enterprise size, you should look at getting into SAP, because it is the right solution. It's a solid product despite some minor issues - if SAP were to fix them it would raise the level of the solution. 

As a user, I rate the solution eight out of 10. 

I am currently using the latest version. But before that, before I jumped into the version, I used the initial version of HANA, as well. This initial version of HANA was not that great, it had a lot of bugs. But the latest version is very good. It's excellent.

I'm afraid that HANA is not a relational database, it's a column-level database just like Sybase IQ. Sybase is also an activity product, an SAP product. SAP bought Sybase in May 2010. So normal Sybase is RDBMS. Sybase has one more variant called Sybase IQ. That is not RDBMS, that is a column-level database. Normal Sybase is a whole-level database. That's a column-level database. So SAP HANA is based on this column-level architecture.

One more thing. The success of HANA primarily depends on the RAM and the storage. HANA became a success because the cost of the solar devices has fallen down substantially. I don't know about British Pounds, but in Indian Rupees, earlier in 2007, 2008, when I was working for Microsoft, one terabyte of a SAN device, used to cost around 22.5 LAK. I would say I would have had a 100,000. I think that's the nature. So one SAN device was costing 22 LAKs. The same SAN device, in 2013 and 2014, was costing around three LAKs. So the SAN device cost reduced by more than 200%.

Also, in parallel, the RAM cost also decreased, and the technology and the fastness of RAM increased. This impacted the primary condition for RDB and RDBMSs like Oracle, Sybase, SQL Server, and the like, that they need to support the foreign key relationship, where I have a few tables. For example, if I have five to six tables, suppose the first table is employment information. The second table is employee career details or his project, something like that.

Now, instead of populating the tables with the same information, the primary condition of RDBMS was to have a foreign key relationship between these two tables and reduce the redundancy. That was a primary condition, but in HANA, thanks to the cheap storage and high-speed RAM, I may not even bother to do a redundancy of data. I can combine all the tables and make a huge table. And as an entire table, whatever its size, I can pin the table in the RAM so that my access of information is not from the hard disk, but is directly from the memory, which is much, much, much faster. That is the beauty of HANA.

I'm still researching the features of HANA. In terms of memory, data access and data pitching, HANA has scored a victory, no doubt about that. But when I compare the non HANA architecture with SAP, ERP, the SAP ERP comes in two levels. SAP ECC, which is a non HANA based product, and SAP S/4HANA, which is a HANA-based product. If I compare these two, there are almost around 5,000 to 6,000 tables, which were merged together in HANA,  making it a robust architecture.

In earlier SAP we used to have fragmented, small-scale architecture. HANA is a robust architecture where one table itself is a behemoth quantity of many, many columns and a lot of redundant data. So my interest in HANA would be how SAP is catering to the demand of reducing the redundancy of data, and at the same time pinning the entire critical tables into the memory so that access to the data is faster. I am researching those factors.

I have roughly five years of experience in SAP HANA, because I started working on SAP ECC, on logistics and other components. After that, HANA became famous only in the years 2013 and 2014. Then I started pursuing HANA very, very actively. Right now, my journey is continuing and after five to six years I have a good amount of knowledge and experience on HANA.

It is stable.

SAP HANA is vertically and horizontally scalable.

Our banking system uses HANA primarily for our financial transactions. There are our SAP financials running on HANA. This HANA SAP was on the Oracle database. We have migrated it. It's very, very complex and took almost one year for us to prepare the plan and migrate to HANA finance. There are around 700 to 800 users using the database and they're not facing any problem. It's fantastic.

I would say I'm satisfied with technical support, buy it can be improved also. Improved in  terms of data warehousing, because HANA was introduced for data warehousing and because SAP wanted to catch the OLTP market. Now they have introduced many things to attract the OLTP customers, especially in banking and telecom sectors. That's okay. You have to keep your business interests also. HANA's architecture is the foundation of the language of data, warehousing, and design. For any project or product, if it's based on data warehousing, I would say HANA is the language for that because what data warehousing wants is a data warehousing database.

Primarily, it's not an OLDP, it's OLAP, online analytics processing. And where the data is not changed, the data doesn't change as frequently as a OLTB database. For that kind of environment, I think HANA needs a lot of improvement in terms of making it more columnar. It has to incorporate up level design a little bit harder, as well. 

You know MySQL database? Not Microsoft, MySQL. Microsoft is not SQL. M-Y-S-Q-L, has been bought by Oracle. Oracle bought MySQL, it acquired the MySQL company. If you look into the database, by default, MySQL engine is InnoDB. InnoDB is the default engine on MySQL. But, MySQL also gives you the flexibility of choosing your own engine. I don't want to know InnoDB, I have a huge Microsoft Excel file with around 10,000 rows, but I don't want to use InnoDB because I have to pay for that. To save those costs, at the time of starting MySQL engine, I can choose my type of data. Instead of InnoDB, I can choose Excel also. SAP HANA should give that kind of flexibility to its customers, making it more reachable to small SMEs, small and medium enterprises.

Now it is simple, because thanks to the cloud approach, it is giving a lot of flexibility to the customer, but if it wants to attack, hit the right target, acquiring the very, very small scale customer, who has around max 50 terabytes data or 100 terabyte data, a small scale company, small companies, that market should also be captured by SAP, not only the big companies. As the English saying goes, small things count. You can't ignore small things.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. The only thing was there were a lot of parameters which had to be taken into consideration and any parameter at installation will be paid. But one good thing about SAP HANA is even if you miss a single parameter, you cannot agree to it for the steps. The further steps will tell you that, "you have missed this step. You first complete it, then you can come here." That kind of interlinking is there. So yes, SAP installation is pretty straightforward, and very easy and smooth.

I would recommend SAP HANA. No doubt I would definitely recommend it. But the thing is, if I adopt SAP HANA, my total cost of ownership in terms of having a functional consultant, as well as a HANA admin, would increase. I should first find a balance and analyze the data, "Do I really want to have HANA? What benefit will I have if I have HANA at my premises? And if I want to cut cost but also get the benefits of HANA, will the cloud option of HANA cater to my needs?" All those questions.

That is the company analysis I should do: what do they do differently? But many companies will be driven by the business needs, but at the same time some companies will also be driven by factors like the existing relationship with other vendors, like Oracle or SQL Server, and the kind of discounts they get when they buy that product. All those things will be there as driving factors. To answer your question, I would definitely recommend SAP HANA to anyone.

High availability and disaster recovery are very poor in HANA. High availability is measured on the barometer of RPO and RTO. RPO stands for recovery point objective, RTO stands for recovery time objective. The graph in which these two factors will be measured is from the five nines, the seven nines, or the three nines, that kind of factor. But it is a factor of my high availability. 99.9% of my database is available or 99.99999999%, giving a chance of 0.0001% for some kind of availability failure is because of natural disaster or some kind of electrical failures or something like that. So those are the factors you have to see for high availability.

My SAP HANA, technically, can withstand those calamities and recover itself from that disaster. That is called high availability. That high availability is there, but it is very, very, very minimal. If you're talking about high availability of HANA in actual high availability markets compared to Oracle and other RDBMS, HANA is a small child. If you remember when Microsoft SQL Server came into the RDBS market back in the year 1997, when they introduced the SQL 97, then they introduced the SQL 2000, SQL 2005. At that time, they introduced the high availability called Windows Cluster log shipping, mirroring the application.

At that time, in 2007 and 2008, Oracle introduced RAC, Real Application Clusters. Compared to the features of real application clusters, the Microsoft product was a small child. And Microsoft took that as a challenge and they improved and they improved. And in 2012 they introduced something called Always On. Always On is an improved version of high availability in SQL Server. HANA has to do that kind of stuff. HANA's high availability is immature.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate SAP HANA an eight.

This is an in-memory database. It's designed to leverage the use of new generation, multi-threaded CPU architecture. We are service providers.

This is a very feature-rich solution with excellent performance. It's capable of integrating with most applications on the market. The stand-out feature of SAP HANA is that all data resides in memory. Processing is significantly faster, and the need and size of databases drop because there is no need to create and maintain tables that hold historical data.

As with all electrical products, this is an expensive solution and we'd like to see licensing costs reduced. 

We've been using this solution for 10 years. 

The solution is stable. 

The technical support is very knowledgeable and provide good service. 

The initial setup doesn't take more than a few hours. The on-premise version can be installed on public cloud and SAP now have their own version on private cloud. Installation is just a matter of preparing the operating system that has certain prerequisites, patches, and networking requirements that need to fill parameters.

The hardware to run a HANA database requires extremely big servers, makes this an expensive solution. 

There aren't many options available and this is a good product. I rate SAP HANA eight out of 10. 

We use SAP HANA for Master Data Governance.

The solution needs to work on its performance and make it faster.

I have been working with the solution for four years.

I am satisfied with the tool’s stability.

I would rate the solution’s scalability an eight out of ten. Our company has four users for the solution.

The solution’s tech support is good.

Positive

The setup is straightforward. The deployment took around six months to complete.

The tool’s subscription is yearly.

I would rate the overall solution a nine out of ten. You can use the solution if it meets your requirements.

I primarily use SAP HANA for procurement.

SAP HANA's most valuable features are monitoring, reporting, and price and stock control.

SAP HANA isn't user-friendly, and it's very hard to train newcomers to use it. In the future, SAP HANA should develop and review their offering for the construction field.

I've been using SAP HANA for six years.

SAP HANA is very stable - I would rate its stability ten out of ten.

SAP HANA's scalability is good - I would rate it nine out of ten.

SAP HANA was very hard to implement.

We used an in-house team.

SAP HANA has saved us huge amounts of time and money.

SAP HANA is very expensive for small to medium businesses.

I would give SAP HANA a rating of nine out of ten.

Our primary use case is for the database and the network.

The most valuable features I have found are speed, dashboard, and reporting.

There are a few areas wherein there could be a patch upgrade, and that can cover up the country-specific payroll areas.

I have been using SAP HANA for the past two years.

The stability is amazing.

There is a high level of scalability. We currently have around three hundred and thirty licenses.

Technical support is excellent. There has never been a case where I was not given an answer.

Positive

The initial setup is very difficult and not easy.

The deployment took two months to implement.

It is a good, satisfactory, and very customizable product. There has not been a situation where I have not been able to provide a solution to the customer. I think it is the best product.

The pricing is relatively high for both customers and partners.

I would highly recommend SAP HANA and would give it a ten on a scale of one to ten.

We are using SAP HANA as a single system for global solutions. 

I have been using SAP HANA for approximately four years.

SAP HANA is a stable solution.

We have more than 3,000 users using the solution in my organization.

The support is good from SAP HANA.

The initial setup of SAP HANA is complex. We did the implementation of one site, and a global deployment will take another three to four years. 

We used a partner for the deployment of SAP HANA. 

The solution has been good in our use case. Everything has been operating well.

A business has to understand what processes they need to use and according to their needs, they have to activate the required configurations within the SAP HANA system.

I rate SAP HANA a nine out of ten.

SAP HANA's best features are its programmability and extensibility - you can size and shape the software however you need.

I've been using SAP HANA for four years.

SAP HANA is very stable.

SAP HANA is very scalable.

The initial setup was very, very complex, tedious, and costly and required someone with great expertise to complete it. The deployment took two years.

We used an external team.

I would recommend SAP HANA to others and rate it eight out of ten.