HANA and the Overall Confusion

Question

HI All,
We just got back as well and boy are there so many opinions on HANA, the roadmap, etc. We decided to place this topic and group all questions we've read from earlier posts along with what other customers were saying and asking.
1. Does SAP HANA replace BI?
The way we look at this is BWA came out around 4-6 years ago (if we recall correctly).  Of the 15,000+ customers that have BI installed, how many adopted BWA (have implemented and using)?  Can this same conversion rate be said for HANA (meaning only a certain % of customers that either have BWA already or don't have BWA (so never implemented BWA) will implement HANA)?
It sounds like there will almost be 2 Data Warehouse solutions with SAP going forward.  Traditional BI the way it exists now and then HANA.  With HANA you get real-time data and instant query performance.  From what we've read and heard this past week a "HANA BI" will be a new set of tools to develop reporting solutions.  Now, how about all the transformation that currently occurs in traditional BI.  Updating to a cube there is most of the time some transformation, lookups, that happen to create a record.  Sure, HANA is in memory, but this same type of data transformation must happen to create a single record in some type of "InfoProvider" that BOBJ can read from and display in, for example, SAP Dashboarding, Crystal, Webi.
I have not seen or heard one explanation into the "SAP HANA" Data Warehouse approach.  Can someone comment regarding this most important point 1?
2. Will SAP continue 5-10 years down the road to support "Traditional BI"?
We don't see moving to HANA.  Sure concept sounds great, but we didn't see the need for BWA (data volume just not there) and we don't see the need for HANA.  We have less than 1% of our BI applications we need updated more regular than nightly.  So these exception solutions we load several times throughout the day.  This works for us.
3. What does this mean for our RDBMS, meaning ORACLE?
Does HANA mean customers using ORACLE, for example, can remove this hardware piece altogether in the future?  Side note:  If your ORACLE, what in the world are you thinking?
4. Is HANA going to be adopted and implemented more quickly on the ECC side than BI side first?
We assume SAP will concentrate on the ECC side first, thus maybe making a decision to go to HANA a possibility.  We really only hear what it does for BI, not ECC.
We could be confused, as everyone else, but I think the above would really clarify things for many.
Please comment.
Thanks!

Answer 1

Hi everyone,
Many have added what they know and it's been a great discussion.  Based on reading more blogs, forums, presentations, etc...  Here are some more thoughts:
We see one presentation that states basically the vision is HANA will replace the DB (in time) for your ERP, CRM, BI, APO, etc solution to run on (everything really).  All real-time data and of course great query performance (like BWA and now Sybase IQ that we just read about).   So the questions are:
1. What is the difference between BWA, Sybase IQ and HANA?  Are BWA and Sybase the same (column storage for query performance) only (and the answer we believe is yes for both (we know BWA is) and HANA delivers this query performance advantage along with real-time data that BWA and Sybase IQ cannot deliver?
2. Why would SAP position HANA as a, eventual, DB replacement and build the Information modeler where you can build a data warehouse?  Is it a end-all solution for your entire ERP and BI solutions?  If it's a DB basically, or positioned this way, why spend the time building tools to build a EDW?  Wouldnt' they want you to puchase HANA as the "DB" and put BW on top? 
3. Why would any new customer purchase BW with HANA available (maybe some time before it delivers exactly what a BW does), but with HANA having modelling tools you can build the EDW there, no need for a BW "on top".  We don't get the BW "on top" we seen in presentations from SAP themselves.
4. With building a EDW in HANA itself, it appears the fontend tools would have to be BOBJ related like Crystal, Xcelsius (or dashboarding we think it's called now) and Webi?  BEX, WAD, Query Designer are BW tools specifically.  So is this a way to get the BOBJ licenses increased.
We've never seen a roll-out of the same, yet different, yet the same products before like this.  The Sybase IQ we just read about from the earlier post.  This in-memory technology has been around for some time it appears, it's nothing brand new.  How are these 3 products working together, or don't they? 
5. We brought this up before in that BWA has been out for around 5+ years now.  Of the around 15,000 BW customers how many actually adopted/implemented BWA?  We don't see much demand out there as far as companies looking for this skillset.  Having said this, how many of the 15,000 existing BW customers will move to HANA?  Just a guess, but something for conversation.
6. Finally, and disagree if you'd like, there is no doubts that there is no single solution that will fit every customer and their specific needs.  We think, but not sure, that there is a place for all these solutions.  Some being the following:
a. Standalone HANA for BW (mainly new customers with no existing BW)
b. HANA + BW "on top" (new solutions developed in HANA and either existing solutions left in BW as is or over time migrated to HANA
c. Standalone BW as it stands today (this is basically what we said earlier about how many existing BW customers will adopt HANA or stay on BW because the nightly dataloads meet their business needs).  Not every customer, like a smart metering, airlines, retail need real-time data analysis.
Everyone please comment on some or all of the above.
Enjoy!