You want to make the most of SAP HANA as well as the applications leveraging its capabilities, but is the road looks bumpy?

As SAP® clients seek to gain maximum business value from their most strategic IT systems, they are faced with both opportunities and challenges. The opportunity comes from the promise of combining transactional and analytics systems into a single solution, something SAP calls “real-time business.”

This approach combines mission-critical day-to-day online transaction processing (OLTP) with online analytics processing (OLAP).
Earlier, these were two separate activities, requiring organizations to move data between systems, which caused a delay between activity and analytics. By bridging the gap between the two systems, businesses are better positioned to garner deep business insights that support better decision making and deliver real competitive advantage.

The release of S/4HANA® has established a new generation of SAP HANA® based applications. Simplification of applications and data models results in more efficient and faster business transactions.

According to IDC, SAP S/4HANA is mission-critical as it optimizes organizations’ digital transformation strategy; improves agility, visibility, and innovation; and reduces costs and time-to-process information.

About 73 percent of businesses are planning to deploy and 18 percent are currently deploying SAP S/4HANA in their organizations, as per IDC. The survey also said that about 54 percent of SAP customers are likely to make the switch within three years.

However, the challenges come from the high demands these real-time applications place on IT infrastructure. Since SAP HANA often forms the basis for the most critical applications a business uses, high levels of resilience are also required. A newly implemented SAP HANA database must also integrate well into an organization’s established system landscape.