Tony Baer, Principal Analyst, Software – Information Management

With SAP having focused on building up the HANA platform, it has been later to the game in articulating its Big Data strategy. Over the past few months, several important pieces fell into place. SAP announced the extension of Smart Data Access, its federated query technology, from Sybase to the HANA platform, and announced OEM deals with Hadoop platform providers Hortonworks and Intel.

This is still early days for both initiatives – for instance, the Smart Data Access technology, while well-established on Sybase, is still in its first release for HANA and Hadoop. While SAP isn’t alone in promoting federated query, extending it to HANA injects welcome realism into SAP’s data management strategy.

Venturing beyond in-memory

Until recently, SAP’s positioning of HANA emphasized its role as a destination platform for analytics and transaction-processing applications. SAP’s focus on HANA as both …