As we noted in SAP developments open up opportunities for the ecosystem, the success of SAP’s initiatives around cloud, mobility and in-memory technology are heavily reliant on the commitment of its partners. One of the themes running through its Sapphire announcements is that those partners can come from almost anywhere, something that was reinforced once again when it came to in-memory HANA.
First off, the latest service pack brings Hadoop integration (Hadoop being the open source framework for large data processing). Not only does this align HANA with the big data trend, it puts HANA on terms with the likes of EMC, Dell, IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle of course. It also opens HANA up to a wider group of developers. SAP also added to the growing big vendor-led endorsement of CloudEra with a partner council centred on an agreement with CloudEra who will provide Hadoop cloud services as well as its own distribution of Hadoop. CloudEra is not the de facto Hadoop leader but it is gaining the support of many of the industry heavyweights. Again, the partnership is designed to open up HANA to a wider community and encourage HANA-based developments.
Then there was the announcement that HANA developer instances will be available on Amazon Web Services (AWS availability has also been a Sapphire theme see here and here) and will be made available on other cloud infrastructure platforms in time.
SAP is opening as many partnership lines up as possible and while that in itself is not surprising, the scope is a departure from past initiatives. The rationale is simple though – more users hooking into its new technologies will drive more connections to its core business applications and thus increase licence sales. In terms of HANA’s market impact, it is more potential that real at the moment. That is not to say opportunities will not come (SAP is clocking up HANA customers) but currently SAP is seeding the market because although HANA is fast growing and delivered €160m of revenue in its first six months, that represents c3%-4% of overall revenues. It is the growth rate that is important however and points to the need for partners to start skilling up.