SAP customers face a confusing array of options and a lack of clarity regarding licensing when they approach the adoption of HANA, the company's in-memory data processing platform.
This is according to research conducted by Centiq, implementation specialist for SAP HANA, which surveyed 250 HANA users in the UK in industries that include financial services, manufacturing and retail.
While the adoption of HANA is accelerating among SAP's customer base, users also face real challenges from a variety of deployment options to concerns about how SAP will license their use, he discovered Centiq's SAP HANA Status Report, that was published yesterday.
"When SAP HANA was launched in 2011, many initially had trouble creating compelling business cases or measurable ROI," said Centiq operations manager Matt Lovell. "Seven years later, this has changed."
Now, 61% of organizations are adopting HANA to process data faster to inform decision making, while 60% want to integrate data from different sources and 59% want to use it to obtain more information from the client.
However, while three quarters of the HANA deployments are delivered on time and within budget, companies that are still considering adopting it or do not care.
Direct access to HANA applications was a key concern for 86% of respondents, despite SAP's attempts to address the ambiguity surrounding their license last year.
Customers are concerned that they are bothered by audits to access SAP systems that are not covered by their per-user license agreements, and SAP introduced exceptions for read-only data and some transactions last summer to try to address the problem.
But Paul Cooper, president of the SAP user group in the UK and Ireland, told IT Pro: "We are still waiting to see a broader picture talking about other business processes that were not in the initial SAP announcement.
"There is the whole piece of IoT [to be solved] and the implications for Leonardo [SAP product group for new technologies like AI and blockchain] It would be great when new solutions were announced that SAP would also talk about licenses."
Change of skills
Skills are another obstacle that customers must overcome, 94% cite it as a barrier. Confusion about what skills are needed is also a problem, respondents who work in data roles mention the lack of infrastructure skills in the cloud, while 70% of respondents who identify lack of business processes change talent.
Meanwhile, 68% of the CIOs said that more knowledge of the SAP HANA-based ERP suite, S / 4 HANA, was required.
Centiq assumed that the new skills needed are more business-based than IT-based, with only 58% of respondents saying they need HANA database skills and 59% requiring skills in the cloud. In fact, only 24% of HANA projects were led by IT this time, compared to 52% of the last report.
The president of the SAP Cooper User Group said that the state of the economy and concerns about future prosperity have played their part in this change.
"Commercial cases have to be stronger than they have been before in terms of reimbursement and benefit to the user," he said, "so I'm not surprised that business users have more say in that because there is a limit to spend. the boat and the organizations will not want to make the wrong decisions. "
Cloud
SAP has already announced a 2021 end-of-life for its local mobile platform, and organizations can only enjoy support for the supplier's ERC ECC 6.0 suite through 2025.
However, with SAP trying to push as many customers as possible into the cloud, users are still confused about their options.
Most are implementing HANA in a public cloud such as AWS, or both in the public cloud and in the facilities. Only 6% are running production workloads in the SAP cloud.
"The public cloud dominates the SAP cloud because organizations look for something more than SAP HANA," the report says. "For organizations to obtain the maximum ROI of their implementation of SAP HANA, they must be able to link it with other services, for example Enterprise Content Management (ECM), compliance and customer experience, which are already hosted in the public cloud."
