2001: A Space Odyssey

The plot is familiar: a monolith is discovered on the moon, but its origin and material are unknown—just as SAP's Hana database was in 2010. In the fictional story "Odyssey in Space," the spaceship Discovery is sent into space to reach a destination omitting a mysterious signal. On board the spaceship, only astronauts Poole (former SAP CTO Bernd Leukert) and Bowman (former SAP CTO Vishal Sikka) are awake; the rest of the crew is in cryogenic sleep. But the on-board computer HAL 9000 (an IBM acronym, but in real life SAP Hana) is increasingly becoming a threat to the crew. Back on Earth at the ground station (SAP headquarters), Professor Hasso Plattner and ex-SAP CEO Bill McDermott analyze the situation (see illustration).

The remake of "2001: A Space Odyssey" can be easily staged with SAP Hana—2010: I love Han(n)a. But the following version would also be possible—2040: S/4, the ERP old-timer. SAP CEO Christian Klein has promised that the ten-year-old ERP system S/4 will be in main maintenance until 2040. No one in the SAP community knows whether Christian Klein's promise is a threat, a revelation, or a slip of the tongue.

S/4 is a lift-and-shift ECC 6.0. S/4 is a useful ERP system, but neither cloud-native nor innovative enough to survive another fifteen years in the market. Which inevitably brings the story back to its beginning in 2001—the last words of former SAP CTO Bernd Leukert as he gazed at the monolith floating in space: "My God, it's full of bugs! The unofficial announcement has also been passed on, namely that SAP was going to rebuild Hana. The SAP community knows the true story of the "space odyssey": the Hana database platform is still full of bugs. SAP Basis struggles daily to keep Hana stable. Specialized SAP partners have now developed IT tools to facilitate Hana maintenance in terms of batches, updates, and security.

SAP itself firmly believes in the Hana monolith. And as we all know, belief can move mountains: Hana is constantly being creatively extended. First a graph engine (see graph theory) was added, and now a vector engine. Vector databases are an IT tool for consolidating LLMs (AI Large Language Models).

Whether SAP's efforts will be enough to survive in this hostile environment, and whether SAP will be able to get their IT team to remove the bugs from Hana, will only become clear in the distant future— in any case, the odyssey of the SAP community will continue.