How to Understand Fake Innovation in SAP HANA
Executive Summary
- SAP has made many claims about the innovative nature of HANA.
- Our analysis is that these claims by SAP are marketing hyperbole and do not hold up.
Introduction
SAP uses terms for marketing or propagandistic effect more than any vendor we study at Brightwork Research & Analysis. Using these terms has no other purpose other than to mislead the audience. In this article, we will explore the specific issue of how SAP uses the term innovation as a term of propaganda and to convert a weakness into a strength, in particular concerning the SAP HANA product. This article made the following observation about innovation and HANA that we have not seen articulated elsewhere.
Our References for This Article
If you want to see our references for this article and other related Brightwork articles, see this link.
Notice of Lack of Financial Bias: We have no financial ties to SAP or any other entity mentioned in this article.
HANA and Innovation?
In the article How HANA 2 Was a Cover Story for the Real Story, we covered how SAP repeatedly used the term innovation as cover because something very undesirable occurred with HANA 2. Something that customers of earlier versions of HANA would have never imagined they would have to deal with. HANA 2 was not backward compatible with HANA 1 SPS 9 and below.
“What is really changing is SAP enabling customers to choose how they manage their update cycles. Currently, SAP releases a new SPS pack for HANA every 6 months and expect customers to be within 2 SPS levels as part of the terms of their maintenance contract. For some organisations this rate of change is just too much but something they have to manage to retain support, meaning those organisations often have to live with the constant change – this constant change of their core landscape can often kill innovation.” – AgilityWorks
Research at Brightwork into HANA indicates that SAP and their surrogates use the term “innovation” to mean development simply. HANA is behind its competitors and is developing more rapidly to catch up. But the correct word for this is not innovation. Here is the definition of innovation.
But the correct word for this is not innovation. Here is the definition of innovation.
The Definition of Innovation
Here is the definition of innovation.
“Innovation can be defined simply as a “new idea, device or method”. However, innovation is often also viewed as the application of better solutions that meet new requirements, unarticulated needs, or existing market needs.” – Wikipedia
What does SAP have with HANA that other DB vendors did not already have? If SAP has nothing new but is merely catching up with DB2 and Oracle 12c, how is that innovation? Is SAP simply reversing engineering other databases and calling it innovation?
It appears to be the case.
After writing this, we realized that we did not consider HANA to be innovative. Yet SAP was continually using the term innovation to describe the ongoing development of HANA. SAP and ASUG adopted a term from Gartner called Bi-Model IT. The idea is that IT can be broken into more maintenance of stable applications and databases and then more innovative items.
Mixing It Up in a Blender with “Digital Transformation”
“The aim with the new platform release is clearly to tie HANA more closely into SAP’s overall message of digital transformation. Think of HANA 2 as an underlining from the vendor that its platform can act as the basis for organizations to transform their businesses into fully digital enterprises. Leukert also talks about where HANA 2 fits in one approach to digital transformation, the concept of ‘bimodal IT,’ a term analyst firm Gartner has coined. As an aside, it’s worth mentioning, other research organizations are not so convinced of the benefits of this approach.” – ASUG
The problem with this is it assumes that HANA is innovative. Our research shows that HANA does not have anything that other database vendors do not also have. SAP is the first to focus on adding column-oriented tables to an application database. However, their implementation of this design was overdone. As is covered by IBM white paper on HANA, which is included in the Brightwork article IBM Finally Fights Back Against HANA, placing all tables into memory is a wasteful approach. In this way, SAP came up with a way of speeding up analytics using a column-oriented design but seemed to have negatively innovated. That is, they came up with an approach that was inferior to what was already available.
SAP had already purchased Sybase IQ, which is a column-oriented database that never sold particularly well. So SAP has a steep hill to climb to either prove that they came up with something new with a column-oriented design, or that their implementation of a column-oriented model constituted an improvement.
Innovation Used to Excuse Database Instability
Another primary use of the term innovation by SAP has been to serve as a cover for product immaturity. SAP has repeatedly talked about how customers would receive “rapid innovations.” However, again, these areas SAP is developing, are not new. They are new to HANA, but that does not make them new to databases.
What SAP has been doing is because HANA is not stable; SAP again brought out the trope of innovation. Therefore, the fact that SAP was “innovating” was why customers should not expect stability. The apparent fact that the same functionality is available from far more established database vendors that already have the same features and that also have stability is not observed by SAP or by consulting companies that advise companies on SAP.
Conclusion
SAP is dishonestly using the term innovation as a cover for the fact that HANA lags other database options, and that HANA has had instability issues because HANA was rushed to market.