My perspective on the recent HANA ASUG report

 

• • http://www.zdnet.com/sap-hana-users-are-struggling-to-see-the-business-case-7000032548/

  A recent report on SAP HANA reports very interesting details clearly visible between the lines. 1st is listen to other customers and second that this is exactly what I have been publishing for the last five years and stating for over 9 years.

  Some interesting facts of the report  that require leveling the playing field before we review the report itself are:-

  Baseline: There are over 150,000 SAP customers and over 70,000 SAP BI customers. Out of these 3,500 have migrated to SAP HANA as of (April Sapphire report from SAP)

  Fact 1:
• a. If we just take ERP customers we find that only 2.33% of potential customers have currently migrated to SAP HANA. Critical to note that 97.66% of SAP customers have not yet moved to HANA.
• b. The respondents represented the full spectrum of SAP users (150,000+ 70,000 x users in each of these implementations).
• The ASUG questionnaire was answered by the full spectrum of SAP customers, who may be answering based on hearsay or their assumptions - our ene3my #1 in most BI analytics design thus also this one.
• So getting answers from a 2.33% quorum, from folks who barely understands HANA might deliver skewed results. I state barely know BI based on the 2012 Gartner report that clearly states that less that 30% of BI projects will actually meet business expectations. A 30% return on Investment for me represents barely the right methodologies being currently followed or followed. I published this in 2010 but few listened.
• Recommendation: Listen to the customers who have actually migrated to HANA and hear from respondents who have opted for the HANA real time Decision enablement.

  Fact 2- Path to HANA:  SAP HANA customers fall into three types: 

  The first customer type treat HANA migration like any other SAP upgrades or migrations-    90% of customers.      I call this the technical approach. Recall that most BI instances globally had over 50% redundant data in 2003 which increased to over 70% by 2012. (how to verify this Gartner interpretation- My Statement: There is a high probability that over 50% of the reports in your BW PRD (or any other DW) system are either not being used by your business users or never will. If this is correct then it validates this statement. If you don't know ask us for automation and we can schedule your answer by next Monday. This category of customer simply takes their current BW and proceeds with the migration to HANA- not recommended. BVA (Business Value Attainment)  score = 30%
• The second customer type, under 5%, are the ones that treat BoH migration with a scientific process of TCO reduction and RIO acceleration. In my last three projects this has resulted in a TCO reduction in one case of over 68% and in the second over 50% with simple automated cleaning tools. This translates into 50% reduction in initial costs and 50% reduction in annual support costs. BVA Score >70%

  The third type is very interesting, as they leave their existing apps as they are and start with defining business value, identifying business benefits and then deploying a stand-alone solution for real time business benefits- This customer group has seen the maximum business benefits from their HNA investments. This is the area I am focusing one today to assure extremely high business value. BVA Score >95%

  Recommendation: Focus on partners who are themselves focus on Business Value, Business benefits and the future of Internet of Things. Cautionary note for partners that treat the HANA migration simply as a technical upgrade.

  Fact 3- Price is a barrier to a rapid movement to SAP HANA

  No matter how we look at HANA price needs a tactical and strategic review. However, as I have discovered and proven many times with some of the worlds largest HANA migrations --> price is highly a highly alterable input only if we follow scientific BVA and IQDCT methodologies. BVA stands for Business Value Attainment; IQDCT is our own Increase Quality, Decrease Cost and Migration Time) using which we have reduced costs anywhere from 40% to over 70%. So next time you ask for HANA HW or Migration ask your SI if they can reduce costs by 40% or more. If they say you are crazy or that it is not possible ask the next one. When you reach the end of the line and still find no clear answer - look us up. (PS this must not include standard BW housekeeping- that is extras). These examples are TCO reduction we have achieved multiple times with various customers some of the worlds largest SAP BW customers on the planet. Customers need to think and demand out of the traditional box solutions. Get free from the myths of SAP HANA. This is pure business value enhancement, i.e. get more for less with zero impact on quality.

  Myth 1: HANA Price is fixed and cannot be changed:

  See fact 3 above. We have routinely achieved a minimum of 40% target price reduction for BoH migrations via leveraging automated tools and scientific principles for HANA migration. In our last case we lowered the HANA Initial HW and SW cost by over 68% Recommendation: Demand 40% reduction in TCO from your migration partner

  Myth 2: Move your BW 'As-Is' to HANA 

  ...and you will pay anywhere from 40% to 70% more.  No more to say on this                                                  Recommendation: Demand a minimum of 40% reduction in TCO from your migration partner. Demand System mergers if you have more than 1 BW. Demand Landscape optimization. demand Automated InfoCube remodeling and reduction for HANA. Remember that 50 t0 70% of your BW is filled with redundant and dead data. Clean this and save millions.
• Myth 3: Use your current partner, processes, resources when moving to HANA 

  Gartner very clearly states that as you move to this big data environment you need to rethink everything. Rethink architecture and choose FEDW architecture. rethink models and opt for automated modeling. rethink cost structure's and understand the strategic roadmap of HANA, and align your current tactical deliverables to your and SAP strategic roadmaps                                                                                                                                 Recommendation: Remember that 'What got you here, will not get you there. This is validated by Gartner's 2012 BI report that 'Fewer than 30% of BI projects will meet business expectations". So why do you want to use the methodology and processes that got you  to your current state. In fact why use the same standards, processes or even the partners that have led you to this current state. Ask yourself : Should your current methodology be used to migrate you to this hyper drive of a platform.
• Critical Recommendation: Ask for our 2 hour HANA Executive workshop that provides checklists and steering committee guidelines on Do's and Don'ts for HANA migrations- focus Business Benefit ideation. This is build with over 8 years of Gartner recommendations and global CIO inputs. You will gain from our lessons learned over the last four years (this is as long as HANA has been there) and save yourself millions of dollars, and achieve true business benefits or at-least understand how it can be achieved.

   Statement A: 75% of the customers have not been able to find the business case for justifying the HANA option

  This is a dilemma we are seeing across the entire landscape as traditional triad partners, HW , SI and SAP, have traditionally focused on Speed and not the Feed. Speed is critical but  someone tell me the business benefit of taking a 715 second report and accelerating it to sub second if business will never use it. Speed in selling is nowhere as good as slowing down to 'plan your work before you work your plan', i.e.  identify CLEAR business benefits + proven methodologies for  lowering the overall TCO by a minimum of 40% as the baseline deliverables- This is pre-qualification 101.

   Recommendation: There are generic business benefits that are good for reference. POC’s are not required any more and in no way represent your future business value. So customers [1] head straight for partners that help define a business benefit case – sometimes where none exist. [2] Then ask for designing and delivering it on agile principles. [3] Involve business stakeholder through the process if you plan to extract business benefits. If your partner recommends in keeping business stakeholders outside the HANA project door- show them your door. My experience: we have routinely build brand new custom RBS (Rapid Business Solutions) in 18-24 weeks and each time returned with close to 100% user satisfaction. In one we scored 102% 25 weeks after go live. Find partners who are business value focused and not in it only for the migration ride.

  Statement B: The media is reporting that 3 years into the HANA option there still is a lack of referenceable business cases

  B.1 The reason for this can be three folds.
• The first is that this HANA is as disruptive a technology as the word implies and thus exceptionally new. It is so new and innovative that after Hasso's 2009 keynote, Larry Ellison CEO of Oracle is reported to have stated that (this is not verbatim accurate but carries the just from my recollections ".. I wonder what kind of coffee joints Hasso Plattner is visiting and what he was smoking there- to recommend the HANA database". It becomes more interesting as within the next six months Larry announced in Oracle-world that Oracle was going to develop a database like HANA. Disruptive technologies cannot ride an existing wave but have to either create their own wave, or crash t=right through the current technologies. All disruptive technologies start slow and then reach a 'Tipping-Point' that frankly I think HANA just reached by early 2014.  It cant be all that bad if every BI provider on the planet is right this moment emulating HANA.

  The second is that exceptional business case, i.e. ones that are extremely successful, are being kept very close to the heart of the customer and the delivering partner. Disruptive technologies routinely face secrecy as they develop new solutions that both the customer and the partner do no want to share openly. So unless you have implemented HANA you will probably hear of few stellar custom solutions other than the ones provided below and one of Kingfisher where I was involved and the customer agreed to share it at Sapphire.

  The third is that most of the traditional SI’s and HW partners are still taking their legacy route of technical upgrade when migrating to HANA. This simply enables speed but many not enhance and need.

  B.2 Lets compare HANA growth to  BW Accelerator: BWA was a new ideation for accelerating BW queries and was launched in 2006. By 2012 when HANA made BWA redundant,  I can track around 2,000 customers. This is 2,000 customers in 7 years, which translates to an average of 286 customers per annum. When we look at HANA, It was launched (GA) in Jan 2011 and today we can track 3,500 customers. This today translates into an average of 1,000 customers per annum. this is 350% faster growth than BWA.
• Competitive positioning: It is important to note that Oracles Exalytics is BWA for Oracle Essbase, so Exalytics today is more similar to BWA than it is to HANA.
• Recommendation: No matter how we look at it our experience is that HANA adoption is extremely high and from where I sit it is accelerating at a faster rate every month. POC's are no longer required as it is a mature technology despite being only 3.5 years old.  Avoid rapid migration based on technical reasons and is  like a leap-of-faith into technical assumptive nirvana. DEMAND optimization, Business Value, business benefits and then demand reduction of TCO by 40%. 

   Statement C: Shortage of skills

  This is a fact, nut kind of, and there is a very good reason for it.
• HANA came up for Ramp-up around Mid 2010 and GA was around early 2011. Early projects were mainly done by and with SAP for one simple reason that SAP could not afford failures in a net new disruptive technology.
• From 2011 I have been advising, via my HANA group and blog,  to go and get HANA certified. This was soon followed by questions like- now that I am certified what about a job. My recommendation was to hang-on and keep in touch as SAP would run out of resources. Currently my estimate is that there are over 16,000 HANA certified resources. However, [1] quite a few of them do not have adequate experience, [2] most of them are still thinking the old ways of how things are done, and [3] very few have the skills of a planned business value approach, TCO & ROI optimization, FEDW architecture, automated re-modeling all with a singular focus of Business Benefits.
• What this results in is legacy technical regurgitation  of old ideas with 'experts' hoping that their old (and familiar) methodology will fit into the new HANA platform. I would like to use Gartner that said it perfectly in 2013 “This is a time of accelerating change, where your current IT architecture will be rendered obsolete. You must lead through this change, selectively destroy low impact systems, and aggressively change your IT cost structure. This is the New World of the (big-data), the next age of computing.” Mr. Sondergaard, Gartner Sr. Analyst, said.
• Recommendation: The skills are all there but o lot of them are legacy and technocratic based. Make a note of all the bold highlighted items in Gartner's 2013 comment, then keep your eyes laser focused on the strategic ball = business benefits. Find resources and a ‘HANA Business Value Architect'. Define roles and then build skill maps that fit your roles. Avoid running with legacy infrastructure, HW partners, SI's, architecture, methodologies, models as that will only migrate all your inefficiencies, redundancies and dead objects from your current BW to BW on HANA. Demand Business Value Attainment and clearly define business expectations- then measure deliverables against business driven excellence.

  Statement D: BW on HANA is going to be an easy win

  Easier said than done. Also this is rather true if we look at the distribution of the 3,500 customers that have already migrated to HANA. This is due to the reason that the HANA evolution started on the analytics side and it took almost a year and a half for it to open into Suite on HANA for ERP, CRM and SCM. If we look at the 3,500 customers by April 2014 we see that over 90% of them are customers looking for a BI solution, or analytics customers. So BI is the sure path towards HANA adoption. Most customers start with BI or BW-on-HANA also referred to as BoH. But believe me it is not an easy win - not if you plan to do it right, the first time.

  Recommendation:  HANA has all the capabilities to deliver Real-Time Decision capabilities. It is the only solution for ‘Time to Information’. However if it is deployed wrong who can we blame. this is discussed in detail in my book BI Valuenomics- the story of meeting business expectations in BI. All parties concerned – unfortunately. Speed should not be the driver, neither should a technical migration become on. It should focus on pure business benefits, real-time informatics and ‘Time to Decision’ factors. My best implementations were where we started with business, identified their business needs, then focused on business benefits and only then proceeded to deliver a solution. In three of these cases the ROI was achieved in under 8 months, i.e. the total investment of the HANA initiative broke-even in under 12 months.

  The survey is an honest feedback by our customers and we all need to listen, review and then base our future plans in accordance to current lessons learned and out findings. Do not under any condition disregard what our customers are saying.  

  Customers: As a customer you need to focus more and more on Business Benefits and reduction of ROI. Find partners that do not belong to these triad but their whole focus and deliverable is [1] Business Value and [2] Making your SAP BW and HANA better. do not forget on asking the strategic implications of your HW, SW and Design when you need to model your HANA for IoT. What I am calling HANA4IoT considerations. along with possible TDI alternative analysis.

  SAP: As SAP they need to focus more on business benefits and more industry specific actual business benefit business cases. They need to create a track that defines, audits and delivers business benefit assurances - what I term as Business Value Attainment.

  HANA System Integrators: SAP and HANA SI's  need to move away from [1] treating HANA just as another upgrade or migration. [2] Continuing with the same architecture and models into HANA; [3] Taking the current BW 'As-Is' to HANA without exceptional cleanup and TCO reduction. SI's need to  look at HANA migration as a re-platform initiative with huge potentials for enhancing ‘Time to decision’ - an absolute game changer for the enterprise of the future.

  Overall SAP customers are smart customers and I almost insist that no customer should simply move to HANA because some or all triad partners are kind of forcing a technical migration without truly identifying a Business Benefit case.  Our of the 33 HANA prospects I have dealt with over 50% of them only decided to move ahead with HANA on two critical deciding factors.
• [1] With the first set of customers, normally very large customers, we took my IQDCT approach that delivers ‘Increase in Quality, Decrease in Cost and decrease in Time’ with a target of 40% for each. With one of the world’s largest BW customer we achieved two critical benchmarks. First: Our plans ensured that their NRR (New Run Rate) was lower than their CRR (Current Run Rate), i.e. with a scientific approach maintaining their BW on HANA is going to cost them less that their current Run Rate. Second: We reduced their landscape by over 40% and then further reduced their BW footprint using automated tools by another 28%. Total reduction in initial cost reduced by 68%.
• [2] Customers who simply want to move to HANA in the fastest way possible without planning, listening or any semblance to business benefits or a true business case. - Nothing more to say here

So keep your focus on

1. Business Benefits, become business inclusive as proposed in my BI Valuenomics published in 2010. There is every reason to read this story today so you can be successful tomorrow with HANA 
2. HANA4IoT: start thinking HANA4IoT as that is a hurdle very few mature customers are just now starting to face. Basically we all took the HANA step so we could go outside our firewalls and collect data from upstream and downstream devices and blogospheres. However, no one out there, except us, are planning that infrastructure, devices, network and most importantly the security. Plan that today so you are safe tomorrow. That is part of strategic business value.
3. Only hire business focused HANA4IoT: advisors. as they will save you over 40% today. They will save your over 40% on annual support costs and many times more as you mature in your HANA environment.  Demand how your partner plans to deliver this or find experts who can.  Learn from experience, on board business focused experts and extract pure business value from your HANA investments.

Some URL's on this topic

http://www.saphana.com/community/learn/customer-stories/

http://www.saphana.com/community.learn/solutions

Data Scientist- Our unicorn in the Big Data world - 2 (ver Aug 2014)

I wrote my initial DS attributes blog in Jan 2013 what I call DS version 1. This blog is version 2 and we are sharing our experience and reviewing what changed over the last year and a half.

Note added on Aug 14th: based on the recent ASUG poll from SAP users on HANA here is an additional item I would like to add.
1. Make sure your data scientist does not take a Technocratic solution in total isolation of  business needs, business benefits or business inclusion.
2. Your data scientist must have a Business Value Architect background with extensive business interaction or you could end with a model that it technically perfect but has little business relevance.
3. Your perfect data scientist is one that can model a business benefit model, has extensive erperience modeling to meet business expectations. has extensive experience co-innovating with business users. And, has a pure business benefit focus (Cant say this often enough for it seems to simply float by the technocratic ears.

Take Chris Farrell who spent five years mining data from a giant particle accelerator and now spends his time analyzing ratings from Yelp (WSJ 8/9/14). The job title of Data Scientist barely existed three years ago and today has become the hottest platform for the hi-tech market. Retailers, banks, heavy equipment manufacturers, ministry of defense, armed forces, match-makers, Netflix, and almost everyone we talk to today want to extract the diamonds, i.e. EDGE data ERI (extraction reduction à Interpretation) from the great explosion of data-explosion that surrounds us today.

Your big data vortex

This explosion of data is like a Data Vortex consisting of Exabyte’s and Yottabyte’s of free flowing data, a vortex that never touches the ground, is not destructive and most humans are not even aware of it even though they are completely surrounded by it. It’s a vortex that we first need to visualize, and then place a device into its stream to get direct access to nuggets that are important to us. In our image the cloud above is the data that surrounds us and the slim vortex represents data that we need to extract and interpret into real-time decision enhancers. This Big-Data is disruptively beneficial and needs EDGE thinking for the data scientist to remotely succeed.
 At a very shallow level this data-growth is being propelled by your smart phone, your likes and dislikes on Facebook or twitter, internet clicks, upstream appliances-machines and devices, downstream appliances-machines and devices, the media, blogs like this one, blogosphere and the world-wide-web itself.

According to Jonathan Goldman, who ran LinkedIn data science team, (WSJ 8/11) good data scientists are already being referred to as ‘Unicorns’ due to their extreme rarity. This is because as we mature we realize that the combination of skills required is so rare that they are worth their weight in potential value explosion (way beyond platinum).

Data scientists need to have more than technical intelligence. Ideal candidates must possess a surgical passion for more than traditional market-research skills. They need to possess a business benefit focus then use that as a foundation to identify patterns in millions of available data elements from different data sources, infer the interactive patterns prior to building statistical models that pinpoint desired triggers.

Just as an examples a biostatistician (actual business use) who earlier spent years mining medical records to identify patterns for early identification of breast cancer now writes statistical models to figure out the terms people use when they search etsy website for a new fashion they see on the street.  At Square, the new e-payment application, a cognitive Ph.D scientist who built statistical models to identify triggers on how people change political affiliations today is working on identifying which customers are more inclined to have clients that will demand their money back.  Another Ph.D at yelp who worked on genetic mapping today is building models to measure the effect on consumers when multiple small changes are made to online advertisements.

The key in all this big data analysis is the ability to make and measure small changes that cumulatively has very big impacts.

On the negative side Facebook and dating sites are being accused of making small changes, data manipulation and alterations, to ensure higher connections and likelihood of two people getting together in order that these consumers would use the service more frequently.

While a six figure salary is becoming rather common on the Silicon Valley anyone with ‘Data-Scientist’ skills with just two years of data experience can easily earn between $200,000 to $300,000 per year. Anyone with Data Scientist in their resume in LinkedIn can expect to get around 100 or so emails a day from potential recruiters.

This scarcity is muddied by the some potential candidates using ‘Data Scientist’ in appropriately either out of ignorance or by intent. However, once the spin is isolated we are left with pure experience and skills. Just as an example LinkedIn today has around 24,000 to 36,000 positions open for data scientists. In 2012 there were approximately 2,500 doctoral degrees awarded to biostatisticians, Statistics, Particle physics and computer science all of which are on the trajectory to finding your data scientist. Over the last year many universities have initiated programs to launch certificate and masters programs in data science to fill this new demand-supply gap.  Taking it one step further, close to Stanford University a new program called Insight Data Science Fellows program takes doctoral candidates and funnels them into data science programs. This program is funded by tech companies close by and has a 100% placement record.

Five years ago statisticians and data scientists who would have gone for banking  or become wall street quants now feel this new pull for their skills from companies as diverse as Airnb, Palantir, Jawbone,  to Capital One Finance Group, New York times and a host of companies who plan to build applications to meet new demands in this world of micro-segmentation and B2P direct solutions. The biggest apps are the ones that are consumer facing.  We all need to go out and build applications that directly affect people’s lives and make their day-to-day living a lot easier.

140808_ Moving users from Report to Analytics to informatics

Old methodologies were never designed with current technologies in mind. However there is a 0.95 percent probability your current partner advisors are taking you down the HANA path with old methodologies. One of these is the need to move from reports to analytics and from Analytics to Informatics.

this year have assisted many companies move their users from Reports to Analytics and executives from Analytics to informatics as Step 1 for decision enhancement. Thought of sharing this ideation.

From report to Analytics to informativcs

0.     Report: concept is probably as old as when humans could write or draw. So reports are an ancient method of tracking events. Reports have modernized with the advent of computers but still contain some fairly standard variables.

a.     Is Data intensive and based on a row/column page orientation

b.    Normally 1 report per query topic, low graphical content

c.     Used extensively by operational users for day to day activities

d.    Can be information or list reports

Users: Operators, Operational users to track day-to-day activities

Type: Sales person, Production Planner, Stock mover, etc.

1.     Query: BW introduced the ability to run multiple slice and dice capabilities that allowed running multiple reports from one sheet in excel. For example by changing navigation parameters a user could flip from total sales by region to states. Or flip from Value to margins.

a.     Is Data intensive or aggregative

b.    Ability to meet multiple reports in 1 query, medium graphical content

c.     Used extensively by modern operational users

d.    Can be information or list reports

Users: Operators, Operational users to track day-to-day activities

Type: Sales person, Production Planner, Stock mover, etc.

2.     Analytics: By the early to mid 80’s the concept of graphs attached to data sheets became quite common. Since then Analytics evolved from graphs to Data Visualizations. These were reports used by management.

a.     Is Data aggregative

b.    Has lots of visualization and graphs, high visualization content.

c.     Has many navigation layers with options to drill into data layers

d.    Designed as roll-up from operational reporting data and KPI’s

Users: Management, directors and VP’s

Type: Sales management, Production Management, Logistics management.

3.     Informatics: By 2009-10 Gartner introduced the Informatics concepts for C level executives. This layer needs to see global operations, trends, Investments and financial flows.

a.     Is Information intensive

b.    Mainly visual and graphical with very few aggregated data KPI’s

c.     Has few to no navigation layers except for experienced users.

d.    Normally drill downs handed to management for clarifications.

e.     Designed as roll-up from management KPI’s

Users: C level executives

Type: Executives

When deploying HANA as a solution for 'Time-to-information' layer with Real-time decision capabilities it becomes imperative to architect on FEDW (Introduced in ‘BI Valuenomics’ in 2010, and move from reports to Analytics for the operational layers. And move from Analytics to informatics at the executive decision layer.

The visualization below is the Decision Matrix visualizing reports, analytics and Informatics in an enterprise decision enablement. Audience is the Ministry of defense or the Armed Forces.

 

 

How to Maximize Business Value from SAP HANA Initiatives

Old methodologies were never designed for large data volumes. Manual modeling or optimizing of ABAP transforms cannot handle big data. Automation with a Business Value Attainment focus is the only path to assure Business Benefits.

The chart on the left indicates that despite IT and business lowering their expectations from BI projects, Gartner reports that the 'Meet Business Expectations' score is dropping more rapidly. We now need to demand 80% and over Business User Satisfaction from our partners.

Level the playing field

Fact 1- Business Value Attainment: See figure above. If we look as Gartner’s CIO BI reports from 2003 to 2012 we are faced with a strange trend. In 2003 customers expected a lot from their BI investments but only 50% of BI projects met Business Expectations. By 2012 IT and business somehow were convinced to lower their expectations and the result was a worse Value attainment. From 2003 to 2012-14 BI projects capability to meet business expectations went down from under 50% to under 30%.

Fact 2- HANA is a business solution: Most customers continue to treat BW on HANA migration just like another technical upgrade or migration. It is critical to mandate HANA as a strategic business solution. HANA can deliver ‘Time to Information’ in 20-25 weeks as never before. Most companies have simply taken their BW environment ‘As-Is’ and simply migrated it to SAP HANA. Take Fact 1 statistics and we need to realize that these customers will be hit with a double whammy after go live. On one hand they will migrate a lot of junk data and objects into HANA. On the other side someone needs to tell me the “…benefit of accelerating a 715 second to sub seconds if business is never going to use it..”

Fact 3- HANA costs can be reduced by over 40%: Most customers believe that the HANA migration is a rather fixed cost. No matter how we look at HANA it is not a low cost option and one of the biggest barriers to HANA migration remains the ‘sticker-shock’. It is important to realize the HANA installation, migration and annual support costs can be reduced by over 40% in most cases. In a recent BoH migration we managed to reduce the HANA migration costs by as much as 68%. Another goal we managed to achieve is our proposal for a ‘Near-Net-Zero’ HANA migration by keeping the FHRE (Future HANA Run Rate) about as close to the CBRR (Current BW Run Rate). In our final solution we actually managed to drop the FHRE below the CBRR.

Fact 4: What got you here will not get you there: We are in the Fact 1 reality because of extremely faulty methodologies on one side, and ‘BI Experts’ that do not adapt to new standards and processes. The writing is clear that customers should not use current methodologies, standards, processes, resources and in some cases even partners if they want to succeed in SAP HANA, i.e. highest Business Value, Highest Information Quality at the lowest cost. In the current state of BI confusion we are witnessing a spurt of very dissatisfied customers changing from one implementation partner to another not realizing that they are simply stepping from one frying pan to another. Demand BVA deliverables, BVA based payments and add BVA project reporting attributes.

Fact 5: HANA Appliance modes becoming obsolete: There is adequate evidence that the HANA Appliance model may have reached a point of obsolescence.  The appliance model allows a few partners to assume a monopolistic attitude towards pricing and support. SAP's confidence in the HW architecture is demonstrated by their new TDI HANA model, where customers and data-center owners can now choose to mix- and-match their HANA components based on who does that components better than the rest and what their DC accepts. It also allows market competitive forces thereby assuring higher quality at lower costs. We have in the past month built and certified TDI devices for two customers.

Proactive companies can and are achieving enormous financial and decision-capability advantages by focusing on HANA BVA (Business Value Attainment) methodologies.

A.    Focus on Business Value Attainment: BI implementations must be owned and architecture by IT. However, not in total isolation of business stakeholders. The only way to meet business expectations is to involve business stakeholders and users all through the process. Ask business what they would like from HANA and then try to deliver in accordance to their exact needs. One way is to conduct a zero-baseline Design thinking workshop to identify pure business value. In one project we managed to deliver a net new set of reports that increased revenues to make the whole HANA migration break even in 8 months.  Start with a 2 hour business executive HANA workshops that comes with tips & tricks on business ownership and checklists to ensure that the wool some partners may be pulling over your eves is not just cotton.

B.    Optimize your BW prior to moving to HANA: BoH projects can leverage various automated options for reducing TCO, eliminating redundancies and dead objects, rewriting the ABAP transformations, remodeling cubes, merging multiple BW landscapes and other small things that can together reduce TCO by 40 to 60%. In one of our recent BoH projects we managed to reduce initial BW HW costs by 68%. Reduced HNRR below past BCRR. Targets most thought were unachievable. We also launched the IQDCT methodology with a target to Increase Quality, Decrease Costs and Decrease Time for migration to HANA.

C.     Point of Convergence: Our technologies are as a point of disruptive convergence. For any technology to qualify as disruptive it needs to deliver ‘higher quality at lower TCO’. However, if your partner, or their advisors, do not comprehend the disruptive capabilities or continues to use old methodologies then it becomes a lose-lose situation. We are currently at a critical point of convergence where four disruptive technologies are coming together with tremendous capabilities to enhance true real-time decision capabilities.  With the right advisors, BVA methodologies it is now a simple process to turn your HANA migrations into a win-win future. Find a partner that can design your future state with all these four technology convergences covered from a tactical, mid term and strategic. Find a partner with a Business Value focus and capabilities to help meander between all these convergence technologies and alternatives available.

D.    Plan with the future in mind: The best migration is done that aligns to the SAP HANA roadmap 5-10 years from today. It optimizes, models, architects and models for the long haul. Whereas the worst SAP HANA migrations simply treat it as just another technical upgrade or migration.

Demand

1.     Get your business stakeholders a 2 hr HANA workshop with HANA checklists by each selection and phase

2.     A minimum of 40% reduction in your HANA TCO (initial and annual)

3.     Clean your BW prior to moving to HANA

4.     Use automation for remodeling, system mergers and ABAP optimization

5.     Consider a custom RDS solution using a ‘zero-baseline’ HANA Design Thinking workshop

6.     Review if your old standards, processes, architecture, resources or partner can guarantee HANA Business Value Attainment.