How Accurate Was SAP on ByDesign Being Used With HANA?

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Executive Summary

What SAP said about ByDesign being used with HANA.
What happened with ByDesign on HANA?

Video Introduction: What SAP Said About ByDesign Being Used With HANA

Text Introduction (Skip if You Watched the Video)

In 2014 Bill McDermott was quoted in multiple outlets stating the following – quote – ByDesign is still part of our product portfolio. We now have ByDesign on SAP HANA, which is absolutely a game changer because everything is faster and better on HANA, as you know. This statement was made after 2013 when ByDesign was briefly discontinued before it was for some reason given a new lease on life. The combination of ByDesign with HANA made little sense as ByDesign is a low cost ERP system, while HANA is the most expensive database in its category. You will learn about SAP’s accuracy on ByDesign.

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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.

What Actually Happened with ByDesign Being Used With HANA?

Companies that use ByDesign do not use it with HANA. McDermott’s statement makes little sense because ByDesign is SAP’s midmarket hosted solution (it is not cloud for several reasons, one being it is not multi-tenant). The types of customers who purchase ByDesign are not the same customers who would buy HANA, a costly database. We covered this in the article Is S/4HANA Actually Designed for the Cloud?

So, what SAP did was to installed HANA as the database for ByDesign simply. However, why was this done? The customers did not need this because ByDesign is a very low-performance need application. This was done to market HANA for other purposes. Indeed, customers would not have been willing to pay SAP for HANA.

Curiously, SAP refuses even to certify DB2 Blu or Oracle 12C or SQL Server for S/4HANA. They are all superior databases to HANA, yet they went to the effort to port ByDesign to HANA even though the tiny number of customers that would be interested in such a thing could have been easily predicted.

Conclusion and Calculation

SAP receives a 25% accuracy rating on ByDesign Being Used with HANA. Yes, SAP migrated ByDesign to HANA, but there was no need for this, and it can be viewed as a marketing ploy. This is because it was unnecessary. It is not so much for ByDesign as it was a PR stunt for other applications.

Link to the Parent Article

This is one of many research articles on a specific topic that supports a larger research calculation. For the overview of the research calculation for all of the SAP topics that were part of the study, see the following primary research A Study into SAP’s Accuracy.