Hana-Busters

E-3 editor-in-chief Peter Färbinger spoke to the managing directors of Q-Partners, Guido Hoepfner and Matthias Kneissl.

What are the challenges of using Hana and S/4? What is changing with SolMan, Abap and UI5? And why does the SAP community urgently need disruptive Hana busters?

The Ghostbusters are well known. For a long time, there was a scientific cabaret troupe in Austria called the Science Busters.

With Guido Hoepfner and Matthias Kneissl, the SAP community has the Hana busters, because hardly anyone has a better command of the technology and has a SolMan, Abap and S/4 roadmap for existing SAP customers.

Q-Partners' holistic approach makes their work masterful: from Hana architecture to app development and management with the new SolMan - the Q-Partners team knows all the tips and tricks.

"Q-Partners was one of the first SAP references in the midmarket for ERP on Hana"

explains Matthias Kneissl, not without pride.

"We use SAP for our own internal processes in the Business Suite based on Hana and were in the ramp-up in 2013. In addition, we are SAP Recognized Expertise in the area of in-memory computing and SAP databases."

And Guido Hoepfner adds in an interview with editor-in-chief Peter Färbinger:

"We invest heavily in our employees and in training. Our SAP Basis consultants have multiple certifications - both as technologists and in the area of OS/DB migration and SAP Hana.

This is similar in the application environment; in addition to technical expertise in the modules, we always strive to certify all our employees as Hana consultants."

A lot of effort and commitment for the new SAP platform, but the market and analysts are proving the two managing directors right.

At the end of last year, Experton Group analysts researched the fact that the switch to or introduction of Hana requires a wide range of solutions, from distribution (licensing models) and technologies (hardware, software, infrastructure) to services (strategies, analyses, business case considerations) and the actual transformation (implementation, migration, integration).

The area of services in particular, with the development of customer-specific Hana strategies and the presentation of individual benefits for the customer on the basis of reliable business case analyses, presents many service providers with a challenge.

Q-Partners can do everything and offers this to the community, even if staffing levels are currently very low.

"The number of Hana specialists is certainly still somewhat thin on the ground"

confirms Matthias Kneissl.

"However, this is certainly also due to the fact that the technology is only now arriving on the market. We specialized in the topic at an early stage and, in addition to the classic technology and application topics, our consultants are trained in Hana topics.

The biggest challenge is to keep this knowledge up to date due to the speed of innovation."

"The history of SAP landscapes at end users could not be more diverse, and a standardized starting point does not exist. Here it is important for providers to pick up the customer and not only recognize his individual situation, but to be able to react to it."

say the analysts at the Experton Group. The use of Hana is more than just a technical upgrade. The right strategy, the right technology platform and a clear business case for the business processes can determine the success and costs of a Hana project.

"Hana is a different technology, both in operation and in customizing, and therefore more complex"

also explains Guido Hoepfner.

"New operating forms must be defined and implemented in operations. If the application is actually to benefit from Hana, the customer's own programs must also be taken into account and aligned with Hana. This requires developers to rethink and adapt existing programs."

In addition to Hana, users also need to get to grips with the new accompanying technologies SAP UI5 and Fiori. Of course, these topics also bring new complexity.

Switching to Hana in any scenario is not a pure IT project. In order to really be able to exploit the added value, interaction between business and IT is urgently required.

Providers who can cover both business and strategy consulting as well as technical implementation are in demand. However, providers that focus on individual areas and build up in-depth expertise in these areas can also play a key role in the market in combination with other providers.

"At Q-Partners, we offer the complete Hana lifecycle from conception to implementation and operation"

is how Matthias Kneissl describes his offering, which is precisely tailored to the SAP community. This usually starts with a solution design and architecture concept. Here, the question of Tailored Datacenter Integration (TDI) or appliance, Intel Xeon or IBM Power, needs to be considered.

Various storage systems and backup solutions also need to be compared. The operating concept must be drawn up.

"Customers often want to compare insourcing versus outsourcing"

explains Guido Hoepfner and adds:

"As an independent consulting company without integrated hardware sales, we can provide customers with individual and solution-oriented advice in workshops.

As part of total cost of ownership calculations - here we usually look at a period of three years - we can determine the best combination of platform and operating form.

This is determined on a price/performance basis using the customer-specific service level agreements."

Business & IT

In the meantime, most service providers and user companies have realized that Hana is not a fad, but a serious step into the future.

The results of this Experton benchmark clearly show how providers are positioned in the Hana market and where the journey is heading. Above all, however, the first completed projects show what added value end customers can actually expect.

The challenge for providers lies above all in bridging the gap between IT and business. Hana projects are not purely IT projects, and certainly not technical release upgrades.

"Only those who manage the balancing act of combining IT know-how with process and business thinking will be successful on the Hana market in the long term"

says Frank Schmeiler, project manager of the benchmark and research director at the Experton Group. Matthias Kneissl has an answer to this:

"Once the design issues have been clarified, we support the customer with the installation and implementation, including solution assurance for TDI.

We offer migrations to Hana for all SAP components and then either instruct the customer in the operation or can offer a full managed service. We thus cover the entire product lifecycle with multi-certified and highly experienced consultants.

Customers usually want a complete package, which we are of course happy to offer."

"Hana or in-memory technology undoubtedly has various advantages"

Guido Hoepfner is convinced.

"Massively increased performance - not only in the OLAP area - with a noticeable reduction in data stocks. This combination results in a multitude of new functional possibilities for optimizing existing business processes or mapping new business models."

And Matthias Kneissl adds:

"On a technical level, the technology also offers a number of advantages that lead to a better total cost of ownership than conventional databases:

The storage allocation is reduced and with it the backup turnaround times. The Hana architecture can be designed for high availability in various ways: synchronously, asynchronously, preload or via failover."

All in all, Hana has very good stability, as Q-Partners knows, but it is still quite new compared to traditional and long-proven platforms.

"This means that extensive testing in the customer's own landscape is required"

emphasizes Kneissl.

Maintenance & Maturity

"Hana is very mature for a comparatively new technology in release 1.x"

praises Matthias Kneissl.

"Nevertheless, we are talking about shorter release and maintenance cycles and the associated increased maintenance and testing effort - on average, we only see nine months here instead of twelve to 18 months for conventional databases.

Compared to the AnyDB mentioned by SAP, we have a much higher degree of innovation here. Of course, the effort required to integrate the new functions and features should not be neglected.

In addition to the pure implementation, the necessary testing in the customer environment must also be taken into account."

PAC analyst Frank Niemann has an interesting insight in this context:

"However, companies are often not yet able to quantify the effort and costs involved in Hana projects.

In addition, companies have to purchase the new product and possibly also new hardware.

Good arguments and convincing business cases are needed to justify these investments in view of the existing SAP landscapes in the companies and the associated running costs."

Hana-Busters & S/4

Q-Partners has already implemented various projects in the Hana environment.

"We have implemented both BW on Hana and Solution Manager on Hana as well as S/4 Hana and also support this in operation"

explains Guido Hoepfner.

"Our customers are still very hesitant when it comes to the Hana Enterprise Cloud and Hana Cloud Platform. In general, cloud solutions require a high level of trust from the customer in terms of data protection and data security. It is precisely this trust that few customers in Germany have."

And Matthias Kneissl adds:

"Clearly, we usually talk to customers about Hana on-premise. There are certainly solutions in which the customer has the systems operated in outsourcing.

However, this is not yet a genuine cloud solution, but a form of operation that has been around for more than ten years.

Thanks to the pay-per-use concept, solutions such as Microsoft Azure can offer major advantages in terms of business calculations. Nevertheless, the issue of data protection and data security is always the biggest hurdle here."

Overall, existing customers today see S/4 Hana more as a way to better SAP applications. They are not aware of the potential for innovation in the direction of new processes and business models, according to research by analyst Frank Niemann.

And there is another analysis of the S/4 Hana market from PAC: while many companies are convinced that they will have to follow the SAP product strategy sooner or later, others already see clear advantages and innovation potential that S/4 Hana offers them. They hope to be able to better overcome some of today's challenges in connection with SAP environments.

Less frequently, the use of S/4 Hana is driven by the desire to transform business processes and design new business models around Big Data, the Internet of Things and Industry 4.0.

Resources & Deadline

In the past, there was a backlog in the SAP community during the release upgrade from R/3 to ECC 6.0 - partly because there were too few consultants and resources from SAP partners. Could something similar happen again for S/4 and is the 2025 deadline achievable?

"The deadline is certainly a major challenge for SAP customers"

says Guido Hoepfner.

"Especially in view of the fact that a lot is changing technologically in the direction of Hana. It is important to ensure that the infrastructure is well planned and that the SAP Basis project is certainly challenging.

In the application environment, the challenges are certainly even higher. The technology and programming environment is what you might call a disruptive change. We are moving towards an object-oriented view, HTML5, a service-oriented programming model and new data structures.

The mere fact that the interface is changing in the direction of HTML5 and Fiori and the data structures are also changing means that IT departments and even experienced Abap programmers have a lot to learn and experience anew."

And analyst Frank Niemann confirms this in his Hana S/4 study:

"Companies must therefore succeed in reconciling the existing challenges, the optimization of SAP environments and innovations relating to their digital agenda - anything but an easy task."

Conclusion & Future

The Hana busters have a holistic concept that includes SolMan, Abap, S/4 and Hana.

"The upgrade of SAP Solution Manager from 7.1 to 7.2 is already a homework assignment for IT managers due to the end of maintenance on December 31, 2017"

explains Matthias Kneissl - the monthly SolMan columnist for E-3 Magazine, among others. As with S/4, SAP UI5 is used as the interface technology for the new Solution Manager.

"Customers who previously only used the Solution Manager to download maintenance procedures naturally have no major hurdles to overcome and can even carry out a new installation if necessary.

For customers who have various scenarios in use - see my column - this is of course a greater challenge"

warns Kneissl.

"Here, the scenarios in the new release have to be tested, recustomized if necessary and transported to the end users.

The new surface technology will certainly also make training relevant. For this reason alone, the upgrade should be taken seriously and planned."

His colleague Guido Hoepfner adds the outlook for the future:

"Every customer who is thinking about procuring new infrastructure should also consider the Hana topic.

S/4 alone makes Hana the logical and right way to go. However, good and coordinated planning is relevant here."

Furthermore, Q-Partners naturally believes that the new topics (SAP UI5, HTML and Fiori) should also be addressed at an early stage.

After all, there is a lot of know-how to build up. In addition, larger and new development projects in particular should be compared with the new SAP NetWeaver Gateway and SAP UI5 technologies in order to back the right technological horse.

"Planning an infrastructure for Hanas should not be underestimated and should also be tackled in good time"

emphasize both Hana Busters managing directors at the end of the E-3 discussion.