The common perception is that the benefit of HANA is speed. While that is accurate what our customers are discovering is that running ECC, BW, CRM, and other SAP Applications on the HANA database can reduce the overall cost of supporting an SAP environment. SAP has now participated with multiple utilities in comparing the projected 5 year cost of an SAP landscape as-is vs. the 5 year cost of an SAP landscape running on the HANA database, including the cost of acquiring the HANA licenses, HANA hardware, and the cost to perform the database migration. In all cases, the TCO of SAP applications on HANA is projected to be lower. Many times as much as 30% less.
What are the categories of benefits being realized? The largest category of savings is storage cost. HANA compression is largely responsible for this. In some cases the database license cost is a key factor. Hardware costs generally go up. Resource costs go down. Resource costs go down as HANA functionality makes resources more efficient. This is primarily seen in the analytics area. With a traditional datawarehouse, such as BW, several activities are required, which are not required in HANA. The set up activities that are required in BW and other datawarehouses include setting up an operational data store, designing cubes, setting up aggregates, setting up indexes. These tasks are not required when setting up analytics in HANA. This provides the ability to deliver new analytics in HANA in weeks vs. what would take months in BW or another traditional datawarehouse.
Given that SAP has now delivered several TCO studies on the cost savings from adopting HANA, we now have a template approach that can provide projected savings quickly.