SAPanopticon May 2017

Godfather and Master of Disaster

A DSAG symposium on Hana in St. Leon-Rot near the SAP headquarters in Walldorf brought the whole disaster to light:
The Hana code is worse than ever!

Over 200 existing SAP customers accepted DSAG's invitation to find out about the current status and use of Hana in practice. The in-memory computing database invented by Professor Hasso Plattner and now further developed by SAP Chief Technology Officer Bernd Leukert is currently in a very poor state.

The error rate of the continuously delivered Hana versions is growing. From the point of view of DSAG and existing SAP customers, quality is declining sharply and users are running from one critical error situation to the next.

The answer from Chief Technology Officer Leukert is not really helpful: SAP provides a software update approximately every 30 days. This may be well-intentioned, as some of those affected explained on the sidelines of the DSAG event, but in practice it is not manageable.

Installing a new release every 30 days is impossible to organize for most existing SAP customers.

Classic ERP applications need a stable core and a robust database. Of course, you can discuss "DevOps" approaches in the development of mobile apps and IoT, where new program code is often created on a weekly basis.

For a Scrum and DevOps development environment, even a 30-day cycle, as SAP is currently using with the Hana code, can be advantageous. However, this requires the right IT infrastructure.

At the DSAG conference in St. Leon-Rot, it also became known that central tools for the administration of the Hana release update are missing. There is still no search function with a categorization including suitable filters that finds and evaluates the existing impacts (bugs).

Because SolMan is no help here either, the planning of release changes and updates remains a matter of luck and has to be implemented manually by existing SAP customers with a great deal of effort.

There was no sign of an end to this sad development at the DSAG symposium on Hana. One participant said that according to the SAP roadmap, we will probably have to wait until the beginning of 2020 until all Hana components have been programmed and consolidated and made available in a new release - perhaps Hana 3. (pmf)