SAP HANA Cloud is a fully managed in-memory cloud database as a service (DBaaS) and is the cloud-based data foundation for SAP’s Business Technology Platform that integrates data from across the enterprise, enabling faster decisions based on live data.
The Asia Pacific region’s adoption of cloud technology and 5G have accelerated in recent years. APAC is pegged to be the world’s largest 5G region and to increase cloud revenue by 87 percent over the four-year period to the beginning of 2025.
The rewards of the region’s brisk adoption of cloud technology and investment in 5G have been evident, especially in the time of COVID-19. During the 10th anniversary celebration of its in-memory data platform SAP HANA, SAP executives expressed their confidence in the region’s readiness in thriving in the current business environment and in driving the value of data amid the pandemic.
Leveraging 5G Technology
APAC is anticipated to reach 675 million connections or over half of the global volume by 2025. China, Japan, and South Korea, with mobile operators investing $370 billion between 2018 and 2025 building out their 5G networks, are expected to drive 5G growth in the region.
Irfan Khan, SAP’s President of Platform and Technologies, shared with ZDNet that APAC’s aggressive rollout of 5G networks placed the region in a favorable position in these extraordinary times. He also added that businesses in the region could leverage its broad and robust ecosystem of developers, including citizen developers, who tapped new tools to rapidly create workloads.
Early Adoption SAP HANA Cloud
Aneesha Shenoy, SAP Asia Pacific Japan Senior Vice President and Head of Platform and Technologies, shared that enterprises in APAC were transitioning faster along with embracing 5G. She shared that this was manifested in the region’s adoption of SAP HANA Cloud and Data Warehouse Cloud, which were released in the late-second quarter of 2020.
According to Shenoy, businesses in the region were realising the power of data to facilitate better human resources, inventory, or financial planning and maintenance. One instance that she mentioned underpinning the value of data is when healthcare institutions leverage SAP HANA Analytics Cloud during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through the cloud solution, institutions gain better visibility on the inventory of personal protective equipment (PPE) or which hospitals could accommodate more patients.
Looking into the future of data, Khan projected that in the next decade, there would be ubiquitous access to all the data one owned, regardless of where the data resided– whether it was in an edge network, device, hybrid cloud, or in a legacy system. He explained that to be able to achieve this, there would need to be a semantic layer much like an orchestration of processes.
SAP HANA’s Roadmap
Next in the pipeline is SAP HANA 2.0, which featured hybrid cloud support with SAP HANA Cloud and could query SAP HANA Cloud and return results that tapped capabilities in machine learning. With SAP HANA 2.0, customers have an option to choose between accessing data through federated query and replication.
Khan explained that the reason behind the need for SAP HANA to be converged with SAP HANA Cloud is to support enterprises that are moving away from on-premise environments to cloud-native and would want to be able to move to a hyperscale infrastructure. He said that SAP HANA Cloud was designed to be a gateway to all data, in line with the emergence of edge computing, IoT, and distributed storage.
“It’s modern data processing that’s fit for purpose, where the real-world data is,” he said.
