The road to SAP HANA and SAP S/4HANA is paved with uncertainties, no matter how well-intentioned SAP SE has been with its renewed focus on customer needs and benefits. From an infrastructure perspective, the demands that the in-memory database and the integration of transactions and analytics impose on the underlying hardware are significant. As little as a few years ago, businesses had limited choice in terms of hardware — appliances available for SAP HANA only ran on commodity architecture, and many of those were not sufficiently equipped for the flexibility, performance, and reliability that SAP HANA and SAP S/4HANA demand.

This IDC paper looks at who is set to benefit from SAP HANA databases and running S/4HANA on Power and how Power Systems adds a significant new dimension to the possibilities offered to organizations.