SAP launches Hana for in-memory analytics boost

SAP has announced the general availability of its eagerly awaited High Performance Analytic Appliance (Hana) software, designed to improve customers' real-time decision-making capabilities.

The new platform will allow businesses to take advantage of in-memory computing to deliver faster data analytics by analysing huge amounts of data in real time, SAP said.

The Hana appliance's superior performance is down to the fact that it places data to be processed in RAM rather than on disk.

SAP said one early customer that provides IT services for taxi companies is using Hana to search through 360 million traffic records in seconds.

The system was first revealed in December last year, and was the focus of the company's London SAP World Tour in May.

SAP chief technology officer Vishal Sikka said in a statement it would have huge benefits for customers.

"General availability is a major milestone for SAP Hana but this is just the beginning," he said.

"Hana brings a fundamental transformation to the way companies run their businesses and is at the heart of innovation across our entire product and technology portfolio."

SAP will make Hana available from a number of its hardware partners and said that it is compatible with any business intelligence application supporting common query languages such as SQL and can also be used on non-SAP data sources.

No pricing information has been released.

Other analytic firms are also moving into the high-performance space, with SAS announcing last week that it intends to launch an in-memory business intelligence (BI) product in the near future.