Does Moving to ECC on HANA or Suite on HANA Make Any Sense?

Executive Summary

• SAP proposed that ECC customers should move to HANA to prepare for S/4HANA.
• We evaluate the logic of this proposal.

Introduction

We received the following question in our article on SAP Layoffs and a Warning on HANA?

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.

• This is published by a research entity, not some lowbrow entity that is part of the SAP ecosystem. 
• Second, no one paid for this article to be written, and it is not pretending to inform you while being rigged to sell you software or consulting services. Unlike nearly every other article you will find from Google on this topic, it has had no input from any company's marketing or sales department. As you are reading this article, consider how rare this is. The vast majority of information on the Internet on SAP is provided by SAP, which is filled with false claims and sleazy consulting companies and SAP consultants who will tell any lie for personal benefit. Furthermore, SAP pays off all IT analysts -- who have the same concern for accuracy as SAP. Not one of these entities will disclose their pro-SAP financial bias to their readers. 

The Question

“You left out “Advice for ECC customers” contemplating moving to SOH. They should continue to run their stable ECC on AnyDB and upgrade to the latest versions to be able to use new features such as In-memory computing without having to make changes to their ABAP codings, while waiting for the dust to settle on all the reorganization going on.”

Our Answer

Moving ECC onto HANA, or as you say, SOH never made any sense. The original argument was that it would prepare a company to move to S/4, but it was just a way to sell HANA licenses. There were so many things like this that SAP and consulting firms proposed, like running a HANA sidecar, etc. All of these leveraged the idea that HANA was inevitable. But now it is quite clearly not unavoidable. And why SAP stopped reporting HANA customer numbers back in 2015 as we covered in the article Why Did SAP Stop Reporting HANA Numbers After 2015.

I recall all of this because I supported SAP sales initiatives back in the heyday of the HANA zeitgeist. The sales teams I helped said all kinds of things that look increasingly inaccurate in retrospect.

So here are a few critical points.

1. Customers that move ECC to HANA will see no performance improvement over whatever database they replace. ECC cannot leverage the analytics benefits of HANA because ECC has minimal reporting. And AnyDB already has in-memory/multimodel in the more recent versions of their databases.
2. Customers that place ECC on HANA will see more expense.
3. Getting ECC on HANA is not a stepping stone to anything. It is merely a waste of IT budgets.

Conclusion

ECC on HANA has no legitimate logical support.