Is SAP HANA’s time up?

Or has SAP finally realised it can’t build everything itself?

Disclaimer: These are personal observations from years in data and analytics. They may be imperfect in places and useful in others—but they’re offered in good faith.

What follows isn’t a takedown—just a practitioner’s view of how SAP’s database and cloud strategy has evolved, and where partnering now creates more value.

I get why SAP HANA happened. For years, database vendors took a slice of the licence pie simply for hosting SAP ERP. SAP did the heavy lifting; others pocketed the database revenue. So SAP built its own: first MaxDB—an in‑house database they could sell alongside their software suite.

Then came in‑memory. Oracle and others pushed performance forward, and SAP responded with HANA—its own in‑memory relational database. Owning the database promised economies of scale too: support one core technology instead of maintaining code paths for every flavour under the sun.

Next, SAP began shipping features that leaned into HANA first, with other databases catching up later—if at all. Advantage SAP.

Along came those clouds

As public cloud matured, a new reality appeared: customers would pay cloud providers for the privilege of running SAP. To avoid missing out again, SAP launched its own platform—SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud (since renamed). The message was clear: one vendor to do it all.

A small interlude

My SAP journey started when they acquired BusinessObjects—an excellent suite at the time. SAP seemed to believe it could simply sit on top of BW and call it done. But BW’s OLAP‑centric design wasn’t ideal for modern enterprise analytics. The integration underwhelmed: SAP traditionalists argued OLAP for everything; BO practitioners demonstrated better techniques with relational models. It often felt like the acquisition was more about a customer list than deeply leveraging what they’d bought.

Build it all (in Waldorf) And so the “we’ll build it ourselves” philosophy rolled on:

• Need a way to create data views? Don’t reuse the proven BO semantic layer—write an Eclipse extension.
• ETL? Just keep writing ABAP.

If it wasn’t led from Waldorf, it rarely made the cut.

The platform pitch hardened: SAP’s cloud could do everything—especially if you stored all corporate data there, too. One vendor, one bill, one throat to choke. Never mind that many organisations have policies against single‑vendor dependency for critical applications.

Be great, or be good?

Eventually pragmatism arrived. SAP wasn’t going to be the best cloud provider, and customers were already invested in AWS, GCP, Azure. So SAP re‑positioned: partner with the hyperscalers; run SAP where customers already are.

But what about the data? Organisations hold vast, heterogeneous, high‑velocity data. Importing it all into HANA rarely made sense. Sure, Smart Data Access and Smart Data Integration offered bridges—but SAP still wanted the processing. Meanwhile, other database technologies leapt ahead in areas where HANA wasn’t the specialist. If you import everything into HANA, you miss the unique advantages of those systems.

So SAP began partnering more widely—with companies that excel in their domains—because building a “good enough” in‑house version takes time, and customers need “best‑in‑class” now.

What might be next?

Does HANA settle into its original job: the underlying database for S/4HANA? That’s a sensible core. There are other use cases, of course—but no one wants to compromise ERP performance. Keep those side‑uses modest.

And if SAP now shares the wider solution with partners, perhaps the focus should be on what SAP does best: business applications, process logic, and a robust platform layer—while letting specialists lead on specialised data and AI components.

Speaking of AI, expect a familiar pattern. SAP will develop its own AI capabilities and agents to connect corporate data with current trends. If a clear leader emerges elsewhere, SAP may partner rather than reinvent, just as it did in cloud.

At over 40 years old, SAP looks to be maturing: knowing what to build, what to reuse, where to partner, and how to share the value. That’s not an admission of defeat—it’s a strategy for longevity.