Today in Cloud

SAP clearly believes they have something special in HANA, the company’s in-memory database solution. Originally geared toward rapid data analysis, SAP execs have increasingly been describing a broader set of use cases for the HANA technology. Now, in pronouncements from a company event in Boston this week, SAP is claiming that HANA will help the company pass IBM, Microsoft and Teradata to become the number 2 database vendor (behind Oracle) by 2015. HANA is interesting technology, and SAP already claims some $100 million in HANA-related software sales, but it’s a very different technology from the incumbents it’s trying to unseat. SAP has a lot of work to do, to convince prospective buyers that HANA works, that it meets their needs, and that it does so better than whatever they’re using today. In the conservative world of enterprise IT, all of that is going to take time… and 2015 is actually not very many procurement cycles away.