How Accurate Was SAP About HANA Being 100,000x Faster Than Any Other Technology in the World?

Executive Summary

  • For years SAP has said that that HANA was 100,000x faster than any other technology in the world.
  • In this article, we review the accuracy of this claim. 

Video Introduction: What SAP Said About HANA Being 100,000x Faster Than Any Other Technology in the World

Text Introduction (Skip if You Watched the Video)

Bill McDermott claimed that HANA is 100,000x faster than any other technology or any database. This is quite a lofty claim, yet it was repeated by IT media entities paid by SAP. It is curious that SAP did not innovate anything with HANA but instead backward engineered HANA from other databases. And SAP acquired several databases of very similar design to HANA before introducing HANA, with SAP sidelining one of the databases called IQ, previously Sybase IQ. You will learn how accurate SAP and Bill McDermott were in claiming that HANA was 100,000x faster than any other databases.

Bill McDermott’s Quote

In the same Forbes article in 2012, Bill McDermott also stated the following:

“The idea was to create a way to Google your own data in main memory, to create much faster decision making cycle. 100,000x faster than any other technology in the world,”

See our references for this article and related articles at this link.

What is the Reality of HANA’s Performance?

At Brightwork, we have analyzed all of SAP’s performance claims regarding HANA. Not only is HANA not “100,000x faster than any other technology in the world,” it is most likely slower than competing alternatives, as is covered in the article HANA as a Mismatch for S/4HANA and ERP.

And in the article What is the Actual Performance of HANA?

Conclusion and Calculation

SAP receives a 0% accuracy rating on HANA, being 100,000x faster than any other technology in the world.

Link to the Parent Article

This is one of many research articles on a specific topic that supports a larger research calculation. For the overview of the research calculation for all of the SAP topics that were part of the study, see the following primary research A Study into SAP’s Accuracy.