SAP Customers Scratching Their Heads over HANA

TAKE NOTE (Insights into SAP solutions and Emerging Technology)

Despite years of hype, some SAP customers remain puzzled over how the vendor’s Hana in-memory computing platform can fit into their IT strategies, a newly released survey from the Americas’ SAP Users’ Group has found.

Fifty-five percent of 377 survey respondents asked whether their company has purchased Hana said they hadn’t, with 40 percent saying they have and 5 percent not knowing.

Three-quarters of the respondents who hadn’t bought any Hana-related products said they had not been able to pin down a business case that justifies the cost of doing so, according to ASUG.

Survey takers also cited road map, upgrade and skill set issues as barriers to adopting Hana, although in significantly lower percentages.

One potential underlying reason for customers’ reluctance to move to Hana is a sense that SAP isn’t forcing them, according to ASUG. Nearly three-fourths of those who said they had no current plans to implement Hana also said they believed SAP would “support their existing environments into the future or for at least five years or more,” ASUG said.

SAP has high hopes of convincing customers now using databases from Oracle, SAP and Microsoft to run its Business Suite to migrate those environments to Hana. So far, the idea has had limited appeal for Hana buyers, according to ASUG’s survey. Sixty-five percent of those who said they’d adopted Hana did so in order to run their Business Warehouse platforms on it, not the Suite.

The survey’s findings aren’t surprising to analyst Ray Wang, founder and chairman of Constellation Research.

“Many folks are trying to make sense of their SAP Hana [proof-of-concepts],” he said. “One of the challenges is that SAP marketed the technology very well but not the use cases.”

SAP is also working on simplified versions of its Business Suite apps that take advantage of Hana’s capabilities. Therefore,”customers have to figure out if they want to buy Hana up front first, instead of having it just built into the next version of ERP,” Wang said.

Hana became generally available in 2011. In its most recent earnings report, SAP said it had more than 3,600 Hana customers overall and 1,200 for the Suite on Hana. But it has stopped breaking out revenue totals for Hana.

This is because Hana “is attached to everything we have,” SAP CEO Bill McDermott told IDG News Service in a recent interview. “If it’s a line-of-business cloud , Suite on Hana Enterprise Cloud, all these things have Hana embedded as part of the solution.” There are also 1,500 startup companies building software with Hana, McDermott added.

That said, the ASUG survey suggests SAP still has some work to do in order to convince customers of Hana’s value.

“SAP welcomes the findings of the ASUG group and continually listens to our customers and partners,” a spokeswoman said via email on Thursday. “We have always been customer-centric in our approach to formulating our product and customer adoption strategies and the SAP Hana product and solution line is no different. SAP already has programs in place to address key priorities raised by customers, including true costs of ownership, implementation scenarios and use cases as well as the business value of SAP Hana.”

The spokeswoman cited SAP’s Hana Academy and MOOC (massive open online course) training for Hana, as well as a recently launched awards program meant to showcase customers using Hana in innovative ways.

This story, “Some SAP customers scratching their heads over how to use Hana, survey finds”  was originally published at PCWORLD

UNDER DEVELOPMENT(Information for ABAP Developers)

In this installment of our IT Partners blog on ABAP and Quality, I will be inviting a good friend of mine Gennady Shlyapintokh  to teach us about using the Memory Inspector to analyze the memory usage of an ABAP program. Typically, you use the Memory Inspector when you want to find out the following:

1. How much memory does an ABAP application use? Is the usage higher than I expect it should be?
2. Does an ABAP application have memory leaks? Does the memory consumption of the application increase over time? If so, where, in which objects?

Here is a brief intro to Gennady…..

Years of IT Experience in the USA – 25. Consultant, Developer, Project Leader, President of the Consulting Company. Technologies Used: SAP, Java, Oracle, C, C++, and Visual Basic. Two Master’s Degrees: Oceanography from Russian State Hydrometeorological University, Saint Petersburg. Computer Science from Loyola University, Chicago, IL. USA Companies worked for: Baxter Healthcare, Cardinal Health, Sargent and Lundy, LLC, SAP America, Inc., GSHL Consulting, LLC. Hobbies: Learning, Traveling, Fishing, Boating, Riding Motorcycle, Camping, Hiking, Writing Silly Stories, Speaking Russian on weekends. Countries Lived: USSR, Belarus, Russia, Latvia, Italy, USA. Countries Visited: May be 70? You can reach me at [email protected],

Roll Area Too Small

Here is the problem: The SAP job abended with – Roll Area Too Small error. This is a sure sign of High Memory Usage! A usual step in resolving a job abend problem is to go to the ABAP dump analysis – Transaction ST22. In my case no ST22 entry is created.

Q&A (Post your questions to Facebook or Twitter and get your Questions answered)

Q. In productive system of my Webdynpro Application I get a 500 Internal Server Error when calling a RFC Function. In test system everything works fine. Can you give me a hint, what the problem could be? I have no idea where to start the search!

A. When you call an RFC-enabled function module, an error may occur. Depending on the error handling of the application, the following situations may arise:

– Check the dumps on each side in thier respective systems using ST22

-In the program issuing the calling RFC, add the following two additional exception types:

SYSTEM_FAILURE

This exception reports all failures and system problems on the remote machine.

COMMUNICATION_FAILURE

This exception is raised when a connection or communications failure occurs. It does not report system problems (for example, abnormal termination) that occur on the remote machine.