HANA, I'm home: Speed as lead differentiator

Dave Courbanou talks to SAP and its partners about the HANA opportunity for the channel

In the cloud-paced world, fast is never fast enough, which seemed to be a prevailing sentiment at a SAP Business Suite on HANA event recently here in the US.

Delivering results as quickly as possible may seem like a marketing gimmick, but in reality, it could be a useful tool that helps partners differentiate themselves.

At the announcement, Channelnomics spoke to SAP executive Puneet Suppal, self-proclaimed evangelist and head of database technology adoption, alongside Elliott Garofalo, senior vice president of Optimal Solutions Integration, an SAP Gold Partner. So why the need for speed?

Purnett Suppal said that part of the drive to speed is because SAP is looking to offer a fast turnaround for prospective customers. "It's a complete platform," quipped Suppal, and partners are looking for offerings that with the end-to-end analytical experience that is simultaneously looped in with business enablement.

"We think that's the uniqueness of the platform and we think that's the differentiating factor," Suppal added. "HANA can go up against raw data instantly, without the fear of running into constraints. That's a power position to have with [your offering]."

Moreover, the ability for partners to chose where to place that speed is critical, too. Suppal says partners can mix and match SAP HANA applications to ensure they have the flexibiltiy to right-size the solution set. That helps streamline the sales process, particularly for picky customers.

Popular with customers

But Elliott Garofalo said his Texas-based company hasn't found too many picky customers. On the contrary, SAP Business Suite on HANA is the first product Garofalo attests that "clients have never been more willing to adopt". Instead, "the biggest issue we have is where to start within an organisation", he says.

Garofalo says that his own company, and many others, often start with SAP customers that are in need of SAP BusinessWarehouse migration. And once SAP HANA is installed, and its speed proven, "it [drives] more opportunity with every customer," said Garofalo.

"We've been drinking our own champagne," remarked Garofalo, and it has allowed Optimal to grow to 1200 employees, 800 of them in the US and the remaining 400 working at solution centres in India.

But when it comes right down to speed being a differentiator, Garofalo wasn't ready to call it the only defining factor. "Speed is a component, but it's not the all-encompassing reason. It's a compelling argument when you can take an nine-hour business job and complete it in 10 seconds, especially from a workforce capacity standpoint," he says, adding that "real-time decision making is incredibly helpful".

To that end, Garofalo did make a small concession. "CIOs [often] like the highest performance machines they can get," he says, then noting that showcasing speed can certainly get a food in the door.

Attracting the eye of a CIO might be a small part of a more effective strategy, but it might be even more effective if partners took up this idea and combined it with the promise of other services that can also meet this speed demand.

Garofalo offered an opinion as to why: "I think you're going to see an explosion of firms developing solutions that can be powered by HANA. It's going to show SAP in a new light and change the [real-time analytics] game," said Garofalo, likening the ability to harness HANA everywhere (like HANA One in the cloud), which will come soon, to the way Apple's App Store changed digital distribution and mobile applications.

For partners, at the very least, this should be future food for thought. While cloud solutions may free up departmental overhead and streamline business, services, software that can take advantage of real time data capabilities may redefine what it means to a provider in the enterprise space.

As more businesses start competing in the real-time arena, every second will count and the ability to deliver that speed - as a leading differentiator or not - will count too.

Dave Courbanou is a senior associate at ChannelNomics. As part of our special editorial partnership, CRN is publishing this recent article from Channelnomics.