Integration of Hana and Hadoop

So you also read a lot about SAP Hana and Hadoop. And rightly so. Hana is an extremely fast and powerful technology that will become an indispensable basis for a large part of SAP's products.

And Hadoop is the open source platform when it comes to processing large amounts of data in different systems. Although there are voices claiming that Hadoop is dead because of the financial difficulties.

From my perspective, however, Hadoop is just warming up for the next round. And there are still many companies investing in this open source technology. And for good reason.

Users are naturally very interested in new technologies and opportunities. That's certainly true for your organization as well. But sometimes you just want too much too fast.

The idea of Hadoop originated somewhere in large corporations, at IT giants like Google or Yahoo, which developed networked data management systems for their needs. It is not uncommon to think that a technology that works for one company must also work for another. Unfortunately, this is not the case.

There is a big difference between a new technology being developed for a specific use case and the implementation of that new technology being the use case itself.

So, if you're not sure how and if your business could benefit from technologies like Hadoop, you need to identify applications that are worth testing and using such costly implementations.

Because it is only on the basis of these that the advantages of using Hana with Hadoop can be felt. And then the calculation also becomes quite simple. When implementing Hana, you can save a lot of time and money on downsizing licenses and hardware by storing some of the data in Hadoop.

This simple offloading is more or less a standard scenario for us. Essentially, we analyze which data is actively used in the system and develop offloading concepts for the data that is not used much.

It is always surprising how much data is unused in enterprise SAP systems, especially in BW. After migrating the data to Hadoop (or any other destination), the SAP system is ready for migration to Hana - not only smaller than before, but also ready for future data growth.

The integration of SAP and Hadoop inherently brings many opportunities to increase the value of data: by connecting SAP data with data from other systems and domains such as information on availability and price changes of materials for production, sentiment analysis for marketing strategies, customer-related sales data, customer behavior for retail and the like.

As long as you know what you want to find out, suitable data can be collected and integrated with the company's master data (SAP data).

To leverage all these data sources, you simply need a powerful and scalable platform like Hadoop and a lean integration with SAP. Hadoop comes with components that can be used with most data sources, except SAP.

There are simply significant differences here at the application level and at the data model level. So if you simply take data from SAP systems, you get results that make no sense or, even worse, contain personal data or other critical data that should not be accessible at all.

We therefore always recommend a lean tool for integration with SAP. "Lean" here means that no additional hardware component needs to be installed in the system, the solution offers seamless integration with the SAP user interface, and opens up the data to Data Scientists and engineers from the Big Data world - while adhering to SAP authorization concepts.