Putting CRM On HANA

Before we take a deep dive into SAP CRM on HANA let us understand what is HANA.

SAP HANA is in-memory database technology that can be deployed on application platform or on cloud.

• SAP HANA DB (or HANA DB) refers to the database technology itself,

• SAP HANA Studio refers to the suite of tools provided by SAP for modeling,

• SAP HANA Appliance refers to HANA DB as delivered on partner certified hardware  as an appliance. It also includes the modeling tools from HANA Studio as well as replication and data transformation tools to move data into HANA DB

• SAP HANA Application Cloud refers to the cloud based infrastructure for delivery of applications (typically existing SAP applications rewritten to run on HANA).

Compressed data can be loaded into the CPU cache faster. Column-based storage also allows execution of operations in parallel using multiple processor cores. In a column store, data is already vertically partitioned. This means that operations on different columns can easily be processed in parallel. 
SAP HANA Provides real time business insight. More granularity with hana you can identify how profitable to sell a product to a specific customer.

Sap Hana is designed to run on both as a Columnar  data storage and also as row data storage .With  columnar storage you find more efficient compression of data.Storing data in columns is functionally similar to having a built-in index for each column.

SAP has provided HANA XS Server which comes with HANA infrastructure .With SAP HANA XS server, developers can write SAP HANA-based applications that cover all server-side aspects, such as tables and database views, database procedures, server-side control logic, integration with external systems, and provisioning of HTTP-based services.

SAP HANA development platform.

Sap has provide a very simplified development platform for developing application that run on HANA.

The development platform built around the Eclipse IDE supports collaborative development , debugging and deployment of applications that use native database procedures for data processing, server-side JavaScript for control and an HTML5 SDK for the development of user interface representation.

The central component of this repository is SAP HANA Repository which stores manages all design time objects. The repository enables teams to work together on a set of development objects, and ultimately turn them into runtime objects which can be used by clients or other applications. The repository provides the basis for concepts like namespaces (through packages), transport and delivery support.

HANA Development scenarios.

Broadly, we distinguish SAP HANA based applications into two broad categories:

● Web-based scenarios that take full advantage of the SAP HANA Extended Application Services. In these scenarios, clients access SAP HANA data using standard OData or XMLA interfaces, or directly use a Webbased GUI that was developed using the SAPGUI5 toolkit, and that uses custom-developed server-side JavaScript, as well as native SQLScript procedures.

● Traditional client-based scenarios, where an external application accesses the SAP HANA data model (tables,analytic views, etc.) via client interfaces such as ODBC, ODBO and JDBC, and only uses SQL and native SQLScript procedures.

HANA Studio

The SAP HANA studio is an Eclipse-based development and administration tool for working with SAP HANA

There are several key Eclipse perspectives that you will use while developing:

● Modeler: Used for creating various types of views and analytical privileges.

● SAP HANA Development: Used for programming applications, that is, creating development objects that access or update the data models, such as server-side JavaScript or HTML files.

● Debug: Used to debug code, such as server-side JavaScript or SQLScript.

● Administration: Used to monitor the system and change settings.

All DBMS activities and Analytical activity such as data provisioning and data modeling can be achieved through HANA Studio .

You can get your SAP HANA developer studio and experience it your self from developers.sap.com .

http://scn.sap.com/community/developer-center/hana

By now I believe we have a fair understanding of What is the HANA ?  and what it requires for you to get started on SAP HANA Development.

Putting SAP CRM On HANA.

There are various approaches for putting SAP CRM on HANA.

HANA as a Secondary Data Base for SAP CRM.

RDS for SAP HANA.

SAP has made HANA as Primary data base only for BI right now and they are also rolling off SAP CRM on HANA. HANA is not used as a primary data base in its full essence till now for most of the sap applkations.

SAP has leveraged the power of HANA to be used as a secondary database for its existing applikatoins, by this I mean we can migrate specific modules from SAP CRM or any other modules to HANA database.

For example. As we all know there is a major performance issues in CRM Marketing module ,it takes Business users hours to build a target group and send across emails to the target group for a campaign that he wants to execute. Hold on SAP has a solution… You can migrate Marketing related db tables to HANA… By doing this you don’t change anything , no underlying table structure or your application code is changed . You only run your Marketing module on HANA DB other modules on Sales and service are very much using your existing Data base. You can term this a Hybrid environment .

If you have a on-line campaign and you are targeting some specific customer you can use the capabilities of hana to analyse the twitter feeds so you if launch your on-line campaign you can identify whether your customers are accepting or not accepting / positive or negative feedback, so you can really see if your product really picks up in the market.You can bring in the feedback in the market and know the sentiments in the market.

SAP has provide various Data provisioning tools that you could use to convert your Marketing module to HANA. I will try to give you a fair Idea of the various tools available to us to do this data provisioning .

Sap Hana provides a powerful tool knows as SAP LT Server (SAP Landscape transformation replication server for SAP HANA) LT replication server is a trigger based positioning system.

More information on SLT click here