Ave McDermott, morituri te salutant

The first will be the last! SAP's existing customers, who were the first with Suite on Hana (SoH), are now experiencing the last. When SoH saw the light of day in the SAP community, no one suspected that this Hana version would become a discontinued model.

In the meantime, SAP promised a retread of the Hana code, but this obviously did not happen or was not possible. In the end, SAP presented a new Hana version with the ordinal number 2 in the fall of 2016.

The origins of Hana lie in the dark. The fact is that Hana was born in Potsdam at the Hasso Plattner Institute and subsequently handed over to SAP for commercialization. What was initially just a database was soon positioned as the ERP platform of the future. Technologically one of SAP's most interesting products, Hana has long sought a place in the ERP universe.

But existing customers quickly realized that in the long term, only the Hana database would have an SAP future. With 2025, SAP announced the end of Oracle, IBM DB2 and Microsoft's SQL Server.

With the AnyDB expiration date of 2025, it seemed to many existing SAP customers to be a sensible investment in the future to get to grips with Hana in a timely manner. The option of running SAP's Business Suite 7 not only on AnyDB but also on Hana seemed like a welcome entry into the new ERP world.

The code cannot be retreaded and thus a restart with Hana 2 has to be done - a disaster!

But what no one knew at the time: Hana - known today as Hana 1 - was and is not release-ready. The code cannot be retreaded and therefore a restart with Hana 2 has to take place - a disaster!

All existing SoH customers can now write off the transformation from S/7 with AnyDB to SoH and may reconsider what their ERP future looks like, because there is no SoH2 officially yet.

Perhaps the success of SoH1 was a thorn in SAP's side and they feared for the success of S/4. After years of odyssey - R/3 (Enterprise), ERP/ECC 6.0, S/7 - the long-suffering existing customer now has the compelling next step ahead of them: S/4 with Hana 2.

Hana 1 is de facto dead and Hana 2 is only in the starting blocks: Many ERP functions have not yet been released for version 2. Of course, Hana 1 will officially continue to be maintained and the date of death has been postponed to 2021.

Nevertheless, many existing SAP customers had to read on the screen after importing the latest Hana 1 SPS 12 (Support Package Stack): "Morituri te salutant."

Yes, the moribund Hana 1 still greets the SAP community until 2021, but it is more a cynical hint towards S/4 with Hana 2 than a real help for SoH1 users. So now the loyal existing customers answer: "Ave McDermott, morituri te salutant" - the doomed Hana users greet SAP CEO Bill McDermott.