SAP HANA Powerful Driver of Business Innovation

Centiq, Europe’s most experienced independent SAP consultancy, announced the results of its latest SAP and S/4 HANA research. Following on from its previous report, ‘Debunking the three myths of HANA’, this year’s ‘The Centiq State of SAP HANA 2018 Report’, is believed to be the largest ever independent research into SAP HANA.

The research delves deeper into how organisations perceive SAP HANA’s technical advantages, laying out how today’s organisations are relying on real-time data handling to deliver on the promise of digital transformation. The study demonstrates SAP HANA’s importance to businesses as a catalyst for innovation and reveals 90 percent of SAP HANA projects are driven by internal business strategy teams.

Some 250 HANA UK users, across many different sectors including Financial Services, Manufacturing, Retail and Distribution, and Technology and Telecoms is summarised below.

SAP HANA is a strategic data processing machine
As real-time analytics become increasingly used in organisations around the world, organisations are able to make smarter decisions and functionality becomes smoother, which results in direct benefits for the customer.

In the past year, SAP HANA has evolved to be more business-aligned than almost any other technology. Prime among the drivers are its ability to ‘process data for real time decision making’ (61 percent) and to ‘integrate data from multiple sources’ (60 percent) as well as for ‘deeper customer insight’ (59 percent).

SAP HANA projects are more likely to live in Public Cloud
This year’s research shows SAP HANA platform selection is increasingly driven by an organisation’s wider Cloud platform strategy. However, it is Public Cloud, not SAP Cloud, which houses the vast majority of production and non-production SAP HANA instances.

Next, 88 percent of respondents deploy SAP HANA either entirely in Public Cloud, or in conjunction with on-premise or SAP Cloud solutions in their production environments.

SAP HANA is a business innovation driver
Overall, 99 percent of respondents this year cite SAP HANA as a driving force for business innovation. In addition, organisations also revealed they use SAP HANA for accelerated innovation in data cleansing, process reconciliations and customer on-boarding processes. This year’s research shows organisations using SAP HANA to streamline internal processes, will see cost savings.

For example, in the Media and Entertainment sector, 94 percent of all SAP HANA projects are focused on business cost savings.