HANA is a great way to waste a lot of money.
Yes, I'm serious here.
If you decide to implement this new platform at your site but just copy your coding 1:1 to HANA, you're going to waste money.
If you buy HANA and don't re-engineer your solutions, you're going to waste money.
If there is no change in how data is processed and consumed with the introduction of HANA to your shop, then you're wasting money. And you're wasting an opportunity here.
Moving to HANA is disruptive.
It does mean to throw the solutions that are used today over board.
That's where pain lies, where real costs appear - those kind of costs that don't show up on any price list.
So why take the pain, why invest so much?
Because this is the chance to enable a renovation of your company IT.
To change how users perceive working with data and to enable them to do things with your corporate data far more clever than what was thinkable with your old system.
That's the opportunity to be better than your competition and better than you are today.
That's a chance for becoming a better company.
This does mean, that your users need to say goodbye to their beloved super long and wide excel list reports.
To fully gain the advantages HANA can provide, the consumers of the data also need to be lead grow towards better ways to work with data.
Just upgrading to the new Office version to support even more rows in a spreadsheet won't do. It never did.
This does mean, your developers need to re-evaluate what they understand of databases.
They have start over and re-write their fancy utility-scripts that had been so useful on the old platform.
And more important: they need to re-think about what users of their systems should be allowed enabled to do.
Developers will need to give up their lordship of corporate IT. This is going to be a bitter pill to swallow.
Just adding the HANA box to your server cabinet is not the silver bullet to your data processing issues. But taking up this disruptive moment and provide your users with new application and approaches to data is what you get.
Once again, leaving the 'comfort zone' is what will provide the real gain.
So don't waste your money, don't waste your time and by all means stop creating the same boring systems you created since you've been to IT.
Instead, start over and do something new to become the better company you can be.
