SAP Hana - Metamorphosis

There was a significant press conference at SAP in Palo Alto in 2013 by Professor Hasso Plattner and then Chief Technology Officer Vishal Sikka. When asked about the current version of SAP's Hana database, Plattner replied:

"With Hana, there will be no version numbers because the database is continuously evolving."

The idea at the time was that there would only ever be one valid version and that the dreaded version changes familiar from ERP would always take place transparently in the background - the existing customer would therefore not have to worry about versions and updates.

The idea of "continuous improvement" is fascinating and reminiscent of a biological metamorphosis. Why shouldn't computer scientists learn from nature? Many years later, however, the SAP community has to realize that SAP has failed catastrophically with this idea. The number of Hana versions that actually exist is hard to keep track of, and the resulting problems are enormous.

The best is not good enough: An existing SAP customer who wants to run his future banking application on Hana cannot carelessly go for the best, which is currently the combination of Hana 2 and IBM Power Server.

SAP's banking solution is only released for Hana 1, and for this Hana version, the HP Superdome is the most powerful server. Too bad, because the HP Superdome is super expensive and nowhere near as powerful as IBM Power.

The chart on the following page shows the different Hana implementations at SAP itself over the time axis. What is surprising is not only the high number of very different version statuses, but also the fact that on October 1 of last year, 41 percent of all Hana systems at SAP were still assigned to version 1.

Two years after Hana 2 was unveiled at SAP TechEd 2016 in Barcelona, SAP itself had converted only 59 percent of existing Hana databases to version 2.

The goal for the past year was to increase the adaptation rate for all Hana instances from 40 percent to around 70 percent by the turn of the year 2018/2019. This was almost achieved.

Nothing else is as controversial at SAP as the need for Hana 2. The vision of Professor Plattner and former Chief Technology Officer Sikka was a versionless Hana metamorphosis.

After the disruptive departure of Vishal Sikka at the beginning of 2014, there was a telephone press conference by the new Chief Technology Officer Bernd Leukert a few weeks later in the same year.

According to E-3 Magazine, Leukert spoke of a necessary "retread" of the Hana database. This statement was immediately denied by the SAP press department and presented as false.

Unfortunately, the press department still owes the proof because there is obviously no audio file of the conference call. However, there are witnesses in the E-3 editorial department who had also heard the word "retread".

But two years later, at SAP TechEd 2016 in Barcelona, the indirect confirmation: Chief Technology Officer Bernd Leukert presents Hana 2.

"With the introduction of SAP Hana in 2010, SAP took on a pioneering role in the area of in-memory technology. On our way, we have advanced forward-looking innovations - on an extremely stable master data platform for our customers."

explained Bernd Leukert, who at the time was the member of the Executive Board responsible for Products and Innovation at SAP.

"With the launch of SAP Hana 2, SAP is setting an industry milestone as the platform represents the next generation of SAP Hana that will help customers embark on a successful digital future."

Hana 2 has been available to customers since November 30, 2016. And Leukert also announced a paradigm shift in Barcelona:

"As an innovation platform, SAP Hana 2 will deliver enhancements twice a year to support agile development."

This was the end of the metamorphosis and existing customers had to expect two "retreads" per year. The result of this version policy can be clearly seen in the time diagram.

"SAP Hana 2 is the continuation of technology innovation at SAP and is designed to help companies better address the rapidly changing challenges of the digital economy"

Carl Olofson, Vice President for Research at IDC, attested to Bernd Leukert, Chief Technology Officer, at the time.

"SAP Hana 2 is designed for digital transformation and offers new, enhanced capabilities that enable better data management and faster application development.

In addition, new SAP Hana microservices are available in the cloud through SAP Hybris as a Service to drive innovation, such as insight applications that give SAP customers a competitive edge."

In 2016, Barcelona said: Hana 2 enhancements for high availability, security, workload management and administration help IT organizations ensure uninterrupted business operations.

With the new Active/Active-Read-Enabled option, users can leverage secondary systems previously used only for system replication to handle read-intensive workloads without sacrificing performance.

Extensions for enterprise modeling, data integration, data quality, and tiered storage enable organizations to leverage all data, no matter where it is stored.

A new version of the SAP Enterprise Architecture Designer Web application, based on the Hana-2 platform, offers IT organizations the ability to manage complex information architectures and visualize the potential impact of new technologies before they are implemented.

And the reality? In view of the numerous Hana versions that exist in parallel, it is difficult to maintain an overview and to apply the correct service updates in each case.

This sometimes results in an extremely unstable Hana system architecture. At the DSAG Technology Days this year in Bonn, some existing customers complained about the insufficient stability of the in-memory database: One user reported in Bonn about three emergency patches within four months! His wish for SAP: more stability and better planning of updates.

Why did this Hana chaos happen? There are numerous Hana research notes on the website of the analysts at Brightwork, which explain in detail how Hana came into being and the technical development.

Many of Brightwork's analyses always boil down to the same fact: Professor Hasso Plattner, his team at the Hasso Plattner Institute at the University of Potsdam, his collaborator Alexander Zeier (now Accenture), and ex-SAP Chief Technology Officer Vishal Sikka are not proven database and compiler designers.

The Brightwork analysts criticize the database design, not the idea behind it. How to design databases and compilers is a separate subject in computer science. Later, when the idea of "Hana" was handed over to the professional developers at SAP, it was already too late for many directional decisions.

Among others, SAP SVP Franz Färber struggled for many years to get Hana running on a virtual environment and to eliminate the numerous anomalies. Much has been achieved since the first Hana days, but the goal has not yet been reached: a stable ERP, CRM and BW database.

The new bad news: At this year's annual press conference, SAP CEO Bill McDermott and CFO Luka Mucic announced a restructuring program that includes laying off some 4,400 SAP employees.

Among others, it also hit a Hana lab in California with 250 technicians and programmers, as reported on the website thelayoff.com/sap-ag can be read about. The probability of completing the "retread" of Hana with a greatly reduced workforce appears to be extremely low.