How Accurate Was SAP on HANA Having a Lower TCO?

ByShaun Snapp

Executive Summary

  • For years SAP has stated that HANA has a lower TCO than competing databases.
  • In this article, we review the accuracy of this claim. 

What SAP Said About HANA Having a Lower TCO?

SAP has, for some time, stated that HANA has a lower TCO than competing databases from Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft. SAP sponsored a study from Forrester that we covered in the article How Accurate was Forrester’s TCO Study for SAP HANA? which SAP has used to promote HANA’s concept of having a lower TCO.

Our References for This Article

If you want to see our references for this article and other related Brightwork articles, see this link.

Notice of Lack of Financial Bias: We have no financial ties to SAP or any other entity mentioned in this article.

  • This is published by a research entity, not some lowbrow entity that is part of the SAP ecosystem. 
  • Second, no one paid for this article to be written, and it is not pretending to inform you while being rigged to sell you software or consulting services. Unlike nearly every other article you will find from Google on this topic, it has had no input from any company's marketing or sales department. As you are reading this article, consider how rare this is. The vast majority of information on the Internet on SAP is provided by SAP, which is filled with false claims and sleazy consulting companies and SAP consultants who will tell any lie for personal benefit. Furthermore, SAP pays off all IT analysts -- who have the same concern for accuracy as SAP. Not one of these entities will disclose their pro-SAP financial bias to their readers. 

The Truth About HANA’s TCO?

As one of the most significant HANA researchers, several factors about HANA made us skeptical of this claim on the part of SAP. First, the Forrester “research” was rigged by Forrester to make SAP happy with their purchases. The details are fully explained in the article above. But the fact that we are the only entity to call out Forrester for this inferior quality rigged research is one indicator of how little critical thought or expression exists in the enterprise software market.

We published the first and only independent study on HANA’s TCO in A Study into SAP HANA’s TCO. This study estimated that not only did HANA not lower TCO but that HANA had to have a higher TCO than the competing options in the market.

Conclusion and Calculation

SAP receives a 0% accuracy rating for HANA, lowering TCO.

Link to the Parent Article

This is one of many research articles on a specific topic that support 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.