Meet the newest member of SAP's Hana family: a data warehouse

SAP has already placed big bets on Hana, and now it’s adding more with a new data warehouse tailored specifically for the in-memory computing platform.

Launched on Wednesday, SAP BW/4Hana promises to minimize data movement and duplication by enabling data to be analyzed wherever it resides, whether within or outside the enterprise. It can also integrate live streaming and time-series sensor data collected from internet of things (IoT) environments. 

Back in 2014, SAP added Hana support to its longstanding Business Warehouse data warehousing software, but BW/4Hana goes a big step further. Like S4/Hana, the enterprise suite SAP released last year, the new data warehouse is optimized for Hana, and will not run on any other platform.

“We believe we have to adhere to the principles of real-time, in-memory computing,” said Ken Tsai, a vice president and head of cloud platform and data management product marketing at SAP. “The classic way of building a data warehouse is no longer viable.”