You can put it off, but if you’re a SAP customer who wants to remain one, you’re going to have to migrate to HANA sooner or later. Beginning your HANA-readiness project now, by researching what the migration entails, can help put you a step ahead of your competition.
The first thing to know about SAP HANA is that it’s a gamechanger.
HANA is much more than a simple database upgrade. It can be the gateway to a more connected way of working, with siloes eliminated and disparate tools and processes brought together.
Unfortunately, relying on the SAP HANA database introduces some significant, incompatible changes. This means your migration journey will more than likely include a costly and lengthy, but entirely neccesary, custom code adaptation phase.
Why Migrate?
SAP HANA is not merely an upgrade to your current solutions but in fact a whole new offering that can transform your business.
HANA delivers all the functionality you’ve probably come to rely on from your database. But it also offers impressive new connectivity, speed and analytic power, as well as the potential to end the need to waste timing switching between various different databases.
With your business processes running efficiently and reliably on one database, you no longer need to worry about individual, manual updates to your applications. With HANA, updates are automated and your applications can extract the relevant data as and when required.
In addition to increasing organizational efficiency, HANA boasts powerful analytical opportunities, drawing from the wealth of information held by your shared database, allowing you to derive greater insight into your business.
Siloed working can become a thing of the past and because all data-intensive operations are transferred to the database level you’ll discover new levels of speed and compute power.
These are just two of the most notable benefits, but there is plenty more to get excited about.
Migration Challenges
We recently outlined the key challenges of SAP HANA migration, which include a high cost for deployment analysis, planning, and execution; justification of these costs; and the need to “fix” your custom code so that it is compatible with your new SAP iteration.
When looking at such issues together, it becomes clear that perhaps the greatest overall challenge is one of commitment. You must be sure that your business understands and accepts what is involved and has prepared adequately.
Once you’ve worked through these challenges, you’ll pleased to discover that much of the migration process itself is relatively simple – with a notable exception. The biggest and most complex step on your journey to HANA readiness is the custom code adaptation process.
Custom Code Adaptation for HANA
Getting your custom code in order is undoubtably the biggest challenge of migration. But there’s no getting around it. Before you can continue on your HANA journey, you must clean house.
There’s no doubt it’s an involved task– the usual HANA-ready custom code adaptation requires tens of thousands of fixes and can take many months to complete. There are tools which can help, but these usually come as part of a suite of other products, with the custom code adaptation offering feeling like an afterthought. And you’ll find that most still require a developer to sort manually through much of the code, because the tool cannot pinpoint exactly those issues that could benefit from reworking.
Part of what makes Gekkobrain so valuable is that it identifies and highlights only that code for which a fix will be beneficial. This can significantly cut down the amount of time that the code adaptation phase takes, which in turn can deliver a big cost reduction.
If you’re ready to make the SAP HANA migration commitment, then you’ll know how much difference a significant time saving can make. We can help you get over the most difficult hurdle in your HANA-readiness journey. To find out more, book your free assessment today and discover just how much time you could save.