SAP brings HANA into the cloud

Posted on September 22, 2013 at 11:03 am

SAP has announced that it will start to offer its HANA analytics database platform as an enterprise cloud service.

The HANA Enterprise Cloud will allow users to run SAP Business Suite applications in the cloud. SAP says the by bringing its wares to the cloud it can reduce prices and offer users increased flexibility.

“With SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, we are addressing a fundamental customer need that we have seen since we first launched HANA. Customers want more and more options in how they take advantage of the value SAP HANA brings,” said member of the executive board of SAP AG, Technology and Innovation Dr. Vishal Sikka.

“With the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, we are delivering HANA at scale with instant value and no compromise. We are simplifying customers’ experience and expanding their choice in how they want to adopt SAP HANA, now bringing it to a massive scale for enterprise mission critical applications – and we are doing this without disruption through the cloud.”

The HANA Enterprise Cloud will allow users to run programs such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and Data Warehousing in the cloud.

SAP has already created seven datacenters across the world to run the platform. Officials with the company say that it will begin to deploy 300,000 computers to manage the cloud network.

According to SAP, the cloud-based offering will be able to reduce costs by allowing users to stop buying large servers in bulk for use with HANA.

The firm has yet to reveal detailed pricing for the HANA Enterprise Cloud. However, the company says that more details about the platform should be released later this month at its annual Sapphire Now convention in Orlando, Florida.

SAP has been slowly rolling out its strategy to focus its product portfolio around HANA in recent months. Last January, the company announced that it would integrate its Business Suite platform into HANA’s in-memory database.

This March, SAP also announced that HANA had 1,000 users. The user base developed within two years since its original launch. SAP said at the time that users of the product included Vodafone and John Deere.

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