With an unprecedented display of transparency, SAP recently announced (Sapphire Orlando) that it would make SAP HANA instances available to developers in Amazon Cloud (AWS EC2). You can check out the official announcement on SAP’s “Experience SAP HANA” site.
Getting your own HANA sandbox up and running is relatively straight forward, particularly if you already have an AWS account. There are also a couple of handy tutorials to get you started. Check out the developer guide HERE.
You’ll need to download HANA Studio, which is based on Eclipse and looks a lot like Netweaver Developer Studio and other IDEs, although more database centric. I’m not really a DB guy, but it was pretty easy to navigate and seems like a solid foundation for building your own HANA offering.
SAP is in the process of rolling much of its application suite onto HANA. Reportedly eight solutions have been moved over so far including Business One and BW. The path of least resistance for most companies running SAP ECC and BW would be to migrate BW over to HANA first. SAP has migration tools available to make this easier than it sounds. Although if HANA lives up to its expectations, BW will essentially become obsolete once ECC is migrated over to HANA. This is not expected to happen before 2014 though. As a footnote and for those who have already explored HANA to some degree, SAP expects more than 95% of ECC’s 32,000+ tables to be in the column store. The gains from data compression are expected to outweigh the performance hit of reassembling data for single reads.
While encouraging startups to develop apps for HANA, SAP is vigorously developing its own rapid deployment solutions for HANA . These include several reporting solutions and accelerators for various SAP modules. SAP has also rolled out its own App Store.
Look out for the Blue Harbors solutions coming to SAP EcoHub soon.