SAP just shared detailed customer figures for its most important product
SAP has bet the entire company's future on this product.
It's SAP's attempt to clobber its arch enemy, Oracle (who pretty much owns the database market, even for SAP customers).
But its also the foundation for SAP's move into the all-important trend that's tearing up the enterprise software market: cloud computing.
SAP shared a bunch of numbers about how well HANA is selling in its various iterations:
The basic database product, SAP HANA, currently has more than 6,400 customers, almost doubling from only one year ago. While that's laudable progress, it's still a teeny percentage of the company's total customer base of more than 291,000 customers.
SAP HANA Cloud Platform now has approximately 1,400 customers. Again, decent progress for a product that launched less than two years ago, but not a huge percentage of the company's total customer base.
SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA (SAP S/4HANA) has more than 370 customers in 2015 alone. That's more significant than it sounds. This product was only launched in February and it involved the redesign of some of SAPs most popular products to work with HANA database.
SAPs founder and chairman Hasso Plattner said about these products: "If this doesn't work, we're dead. Flat-out dead. It's that simple," he told Re/Code's Arik Hesseldahl after the launch.
The SAP Business Warehouse application on SAP HANA now has over 1,900 customers. While that's good for SAP, warehouse is mostly a dying breed of tech, being replaced by new big-data tech, particularly one called Hadoop.
So, at long last, as part of Tuesday's announcements, SAP announced that HANA would support Hadoop, and in Hadoop's two most popular flavors, Cloudera and Hortonworks.
That's a critical feature if HANA is to be taken seriously as a database that's ready for the future.
When counting employees at all these customer sites, there are more than 815,000 active users of SAP HANA, SAP says.
As we mentioned, SAP also added a bunch more features. (There's a great analysis of each feature by Constellation Research's Holger Mueller, if you want a deep dive.)
Most of the new features are "housekeeping" things, rather than innovations that no one else offers, Mueller concludes, but that's not a bad thing.
"We know a number of enterprises have been waiting for these capabilities to start or extend their investments into HANA - so it's good to see SAP delivering on these."