Ambitous Deadline for SAP ERP on HANA

On the day of the 2011 SAP earnings press conference, last Wednesday, some news about SAP's outlook for 2012 beyond financial projections came from Vishal Sikka, SAP's CTO. According to Sikka, SAP will offer support for SAP ERP on the SAP HANA in-memory database platform by the end of the year.

It has been known for a while that SAP has been planning to advance HANA as the underlying architecture for SAP of the future (see In-Memory Future: Gartner Assesses SAP HANA Architecture), although SAP only officially announced that HANA "is at the core of its platform roadmap" in December.

SAP's offerings for making use of HANA's in-memory technology so far have included HANA as an analytics appliance, specialty applications such as the SAP CO-PA Accelerator and SAP Smart Meter Analytics built on the platform. One of the most recent offerings, SAP BW on HANA, is the first to access HANA as the database layer of the application. SAP ERP on HANA is SAP's next step toward making HANA the underlying platform for all of SAP. After ERP, support is forthcoming for other modules of SAP's Business Suite such as CRM and SRM.

At the end of SAP's roadmap for HANA, the in-memory database will serve as the basis of a platform-as-a-service.