Plan B - An AnyDB Strategy?

Forecasts are difficult, especially when they concern the future. Here, however, the scene experts agree: There will not be a database monoculture with SAP Hana.

It is unlikely that the majority of existing SAP customers will be willing or able to give up their acquired knowledge and stable applications based on Oracle, IBM DB2 and SQL Server.

No one is arguing against the young high-tech database Hana. The innovation by Professor Hasso Plattner, ex-SAP CTO Vishal Sikka and Accenture manager Alexander Zeier, created at HPI in Potsdam, cannot be praised and appreciated highly enough. But Hana is a new approach in the ERP/BW sector that first has to prove itself.

Oracle, DB2 and the SQL server have gone through the valley of tears and now present themselves as the most stable platform for R/3 up to ECC 6.0.

The SAP Business Suite with Oracle or IBM is proven and powerful. Abap modifications from the Z namespace work - even when switching to the latest DB generation from Oracle and IBM including in-memory computing.

No one is denying SAP's latest database child a successful future. But that future is still far off. The horns have not yet been sounded and the bugs have not yet been eliminated. Anomalies are still being observed in virtualization.

Of course, there is a roadmap - but even well-known SAP partners recommend waiting until at least 2020, when there will be the first complete and consolidated Hana release: Right now, Hana is like a tinkering project from the magazine store - every week there is a new issue with more parts to add.

SAP has officially set a deadline: By 2025, every existing SAP customer should be converted to S/4 and Hana. At a DSAG keynote, SAP Executive Board member Michael Kleinemeier already put this ambitious goal into perspective, saying, "2025 at the earliest."

In the meantime, it has become known that SAP has obtained a commitment from Oracle and IBM that there can be cooperation beyond 2025 to maintain and service the "remaining" SAP existing customers on AnyDB and the Business Suite. However, things could also turn out quite differently: Plan B.

SAP Chief Technology Officer Bernd Leukert explicitly emphasized during a press conference at the DSAG Annual Congress 2014 that it would also be technically possible to package DB2 with Blu (IBM's in-memory computing) for S/4.

Meanwhile, experts are talking about the possibility of being able to run the new S/4 on Oracle and DB2 after 2025. Rumors from Walldorf suggest that preparations and initial tests are already underway for this technical milestone.

This would also fulfill a long-standing demand of DSAG: to give existing customers the choice of database in the future, even under S/4.

Nevertheless, the probability of Plan B is currently no more than 50 percent. SAP is sitting between two stools: On the one hand, it wants satisfied customers - and they demand a choice of database; on the other hand, it wants and needs to increase its margin, and the quickest and easiest way to do that is to reduce its own costs:

SAP therefore does not want to and cannot go back to the old heterogeneous world, where support from Walldorf had to look after hundreds of combinations of hardware, operating systems and databases.

The monoculture "Intel, Linux and Hana" would be optimal for the profit motive. Now there are already two hardware platforms, Intel Xeon and IBM Power, two Linux derivatives, Suse and Red Hat, then two more databases in addition to Hana - that would de facto corrupt the new SAP support model.

Plan B will therefore choose between: "a heart for existing customers" and "an analytical head for more profit".