SAP Brings HANA to Small Businesses; Aims to Solve their Big Data Problems

SAP (NYSE:SAP) has launched two new applications powered by its HANA, in-memory, high performance computing appliance – SAP HANA for SAP Business One and SAP HANA Edge Edition. ^[1] With these new releases, SAP aims to bring its HANA appliance to small and medium sized businesses. HANA for SAP Business One will enable customers to run their analytics and business intelligence applications to analyze and make sense of the tons of unstructured data generated by their systems in real time, in order to improve decision making and boost sales. The use of big data in small businesses has increased significantly in the past year. With these new offerings, SAP will be able to compete in the growing business intelligence software market with the likes of IBM (NYSE:IBM) and Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL), by focusing even on small businesses.

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Focus on Small Businesses Could Help SAP Win the “Big Data” Fight

A channel partner for SAP Business One stated:

Analytics powered by SAP HANA for SAP Business One will offer customers the flexibility to create interactive reports and run ad-hoc analysis faster than before. Another major advantage is the access to relevant information in seconds with freestyle search, with the ability to navigate through various business objects from SAP Business One without having to move from screen to screen due to it all being included in the current cockpit. We expect that customers will benefit from tremendously improved productivity.

SAP is banking on HANA to drive sales in the coming years. In its recent earnings release, it revealed that HANA exceeded 2011 sales estimates by 40%, and is expected to generate increasing amounts of revenue going forward.

SAP had a market share of 28% in business intelligence software in 2011. Thanks to HANA and its other big data offerings, we expect SAP’s market share to increase throughout the forecast period. Business Intelligence software accounts for nearly 14% of SAP’s $62 Trefis price estimate, which stands marginally below its market price.

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1. SAP to Arm Small and Midsize Enterprises With Real-Time Analytics Powered by SAP HANA, Press Release [↩]