SAP aims for 3-second response times with HANA platform

SAP customers can now have their Business Suite powered by its HANA platform, which the software giant claims will allow users to carry out critical business processes in real-time.

HANA uses in-memory technology rather than traditional spinning disks, allowing information to be processed and analysed in real-time.

Hasso Plattner, SAP co-founder and chairman of the SAP supervisory board championed the HANA project and claimed it was critical to the firm's future.

To get the response time of 3 secs requires rethinking of user interactions.

Speed and mobility are the key features SAP has worked on. Plattner claimed that analytics can be carried out between 10-1000 times faster than previous generations.

"Speed is important because of mobile we want information but we don't want to wait for more than 3 seconds nobody starts an app on their phone and waits 30 secs to load," said Platnner during the launch.

"We prepared ourselves for a world where the mobile world is [going to] dominate. We have to be everywhere on every single device, whether it is on Apple or Android."

SAP claims placing online analytical processing (OLAP) and online transaction processing (OLTP) into one place, means customers will benefit from huge savings out-of-the-box. The firm has worked to eliminate batch processing to improve efficiency.

Customers will be able to move to the new Business Suite via a "non-disruptive" service pack or migrate their database via a rapid deployment service offered.

Despite SAP seeing Hana as the future of analytics, the firm claimed it has not abandoned its customers. SAP applications will continue to function on databases run by competitors including Oracle, IBM and Microsoft.