SAP makes HANA available on the PC and offline

Aiming to make it simpler to experiment with SAP HANA, and to prototype and build applications on the platform, SAP Monday announced a new SAP HANA, express edition, of its in-memory platform that developers can download for free to their desktops or laptops, or use in the cloud.

“It is a streamlined, smaller version of SAP HANA,” says Marie Goodell, vice president, SAP HANA Platform Marketing. “This is exciting for us. It allows a developer to bring this down to a personal computer that he or she feels comfortable with.”

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The new express edition can be used to develop, test and deploy production applications that use up to 32 GB of memory for free, and Goodell says developers can upgrade for a fee for more memory. It delivers database, application and advanced analytics services in a single platform, allowing developers to build applications that use SAP HANA to perform transactional and analytical processing against a single copy of data, whether structured or unstructured.

SAP gets personal

The company also announced a new personal edition of SAP Web integrated development environment (IDE) for offline application development that features planned automatic synchronization upon connection to the cloud. SAP released a new software development kit (SDK) to accompany the Web IDE that supports quick creation of new application templates and the integration of partner tools into the SAP Web IDE.

“You can take it offline now and do development offline on your computer,” says Dan Lahl, vice president of Product Marketing, SAP. “You can sync it up when you’re back online. We’ve opened it up for partners and developers to build their own plug-ins into the Web IDE. It can be one place for all development, testing and monitoring for any application built on the platform.”

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Lahl notes the the following features of personal edition of the IDE:

• It can be installed on a personal workstation for offline development by a single developer, with seamless integration to other SAP HANA Cloud Platform capabilities.
• It offers developers the capability to work from anywhere, even disconnected from the Internet, as well as the ability to resume the work on the cloud after a brief sync.
• It can be used for test and evaluation or even for productive offline development for customers with a paid subscription to SAP HANA Cloud Platform, Web IDE.

Digital transformation and SAP

Goodell and Lahl say the SAP HANA, express edition, and SAP Web IDE both reflect SAP’s own digital transformation and a renewed dedication to being responsive to developer needs.

“One thing SAP believes HANA is good for is to be the foundation for digital transformation with this new world of all types of data coming from so many places,” Goodell says. “If we want to encourage our customers to look at how data is changing the world, we had to change our world as well.”

“We are maturing as a company to understand today’s application developer and what they want and need,” Lahl says. “We’ve stopped listening to ourselves and started listening to our constituents and market.”

SAP HANA, express edition, can be downloaded from the SAP developer center and installed on commodity servers, desktops or laptops using a binary installation package with support for either SUSE Linux Enterprise Server or Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It can also be installed on Windows or Mac OS via a virtual machine installation image distributed with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.