Push button ease of deployment with SAP Business One and HANA

Push button ease of deployment with SAP Business One and HANA

After going through the process of setting up my own HANA server (with the help of Marco Blanco from our Solution Architect team) and delivering a number of demonstrations of the solution including a few that I have recently recorded for the DemosOnDemand content and a couple of sessions that I will be posting on YouTube, I wanted to take the time to post some initial thoughts on what we have delivered under the product name of SAP Business One Analytics powered by SAP HANA (quite a mouthful of a name).

My first observation is how simple it is to implement the solution in to an existing SAP Business One environment.

Once the HANA Server is configured, which partners and customers don’t need to do because HANA is delivered pre-installed on an appliance, but I did because I love to see how things need to be built from the ground up (as evidenced by many broken watches, clocks, toys and of course electrical items and computers in my past), the process of connecting the HANA Server and setting up the Business One real time replication takes about 2 minutes.

The process of activating the HANA content inside SAP Business One takes another 2 minutes and installing the HANA DB client and the HANA studio took about 5 minutes and I was up and running with a fully functional B1A deployment.

Certainly not what I expected based on the power of the HANA solution…..I was expecting much more complexity in the process but compliments to the development team that built the solution…it was incredibly simple and I was able to immediately start utilizing the pre-built content in the Interactive Analysis, the HANA dashboards and of course the Enterprise Search after a total of 20 minutes from the configuration start to the finish.

And the system has been ticking over happily without skipping a beat since the setup.

I have started my initial investigations of the HANA Studio that allows a customer or partner to build their own additional data models and deploy them and so far, it has been a great Out of the Box experience….I was immediately able to take my existing SQL knowledge and start writing queries in the system.

I can’t wait to really roll up my sleeves and start building some data models with more complexity as this is where I believe that the real power of HANA will be realized.

Of course, as was designed, you can immediately start generating a return on your investment as soon as you tick the box inside SAP Business One that activates the HANA based content – which was a key design goal for the solution.

But as we are already hearing from customers who have rolled out the HANA software, the real power comes once you start to set your imagination free and start to build new decision support models that deliver, at the risk of using the much tossed around word, real usable business insight.

Stay tuned for more updates as I get to use the system and we gain even more knowledge and understanding of how customers are using what we have delivered in this first phase of our HANA journey with SAP Business One.

I am looking forward to hearing from you, our customers and partners, about how you have been able to leverage the power of HANA in your business and from now until December 31st 2012 , I will be running an informal competition where I will award a prize of a new iPad to the partner or customer that submits the best example of how they are using, or plan to use SAP Business One Analytics powered by SAP HANA.

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