n 16th July 2013, SAP has announced SAP HANA Roadmap; it is extensive and exhaustive in nature.

SAP Product Roadmap : SAP HANA <= The full information available here.

SAP has provided an extensive window into the future direction of its HANA in-memory database platform, which has emerged as the central pillar of the company's product strategy.

A lengthy HANA road map document, which was made public this week, reveals a wide array of upcoming features, although no specific release dates were given and it notes that plans can change "at any time".

Over time, HANA customers can expect improved integration with the Hadoop framework for large-scale data processing, including "tighter modeling and runtime integration with Hadoop structures and data," according to the road map document.

SAP will also enhance HANA's integration with Sybase Power Designer, focused on "model interoperability and management" with HANA, it states.

"Key" features and intellectual property from Sybase IQ, the columnar analytic database, will be embedded at some point into HANA as well, according to the document.

On the deployment front, HANA customers can expect "enhanced and flexible data centre deployment options," the document states, without further explanation. SAP will also offer support for virtualised HANA instances "on validated appliances," it adds.

Other road map plans include various improvements to security and more support for third-party tooling.

The new features will likely come in waves as SAP continues rolling out service packs for HANA.

While SAP has been criticized in the past for having a slow pace of development, it would be hard to say the same thing about HANA. The product went into general availability in June 2011 and SAP has released six of the service packs so far.

SAP has ported its Business Suite software to run on HANA and recently launched a HANA-powered managed hosting service, which it expects will help drive further sales. - extracted from IDG News