What most people call “SAP” is SAP’s Enterprise Resource Planning Software (SAP ERP), which runs businesses Finance and other back-office processes. SAP ERP can use the HANA platform as its engine (instead of Oracle/IBM/Microsoft databases).
SAP HANA is an application platform, but with significant capabilities not matched elsewhere in the market. It can be used as the database for SAP ERP, or for many other uses.
What are the advantages of SAP HANA?
• The main advantage of SAP HANA is that because it is very fast, you can build much simpler software that relies on one copy of information. Traditional software relies on layers of information which are copied at different levels of detail to present information the correct format.
• With HANA, your information is stored once, and then the report or response that you requires is calculated on demand.
• This mean that a country-level P&L report is produced from the individual sales and costs in real-time, or that a forecast is produced based on the latest available information.
• This, in turn, leads to a massive simplification in software design and cost.
SAP BW on HANA:
SAP has made it very clear that SAP HANA is the platform for innovation for all of its products, and so we see a lot of customers looking to define an in-memory strategy. One of the reasons why SAP BW is such a popular component is that it represents a first step for many companies, into implementing the HANA platform.
BW is a good choice because it is less mission-critical than transactional systems like ERP and it allows companies with established people and processes to understand the technology, how to implement it and how to support it.
SAP BPC on HANA:
Running BPC on a SAP BW on HANA platform removes the constraints and comprises associated with traditional SAP BPC solutions. Reporting on greater volumes of data is possible, leading to the ability to budget and forecast at a more granular level. With the latest version of BPC, calculations are pushed down into the database layer, enabling more complex planning model calculations to be performed in real-time which unleashes a whole host of opportunities.