IBM Cloud Pak for Data vs SAP HANA comparison

Cancel
You must select at least 2 products to compare!
IBM Logo
367 views|238 comparisons
84% willing to recommend
SAP Logo
367 views|297 comparisons
91% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between IBM Cloud Pak for Data and SAP HANA based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Data Virtualization solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed IBM Cloud Pak for Data vs. SAP HANA Report (Updated: March 2024).
767,847 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"One of Cloud Pak's best features is the Watson Knowledge Catalog, which helps you implement data governance.""DataStage allows me to connect to different data sources.""Its data preparation capabilities are highly valuable.""The most valuable features are data virtualization and reporting.""It is a scalable solution, and we have had no issues with its scalability in our company. I rate the solution's scalability a nine out of ten.""Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine or ten out of ten.""The most valuable features of IBM Cloud Pak for Data are the Watson Studio, where we can initiate more groups and write code. Additionally, Watson Machine Learning is available with many other services, such as APIs which you can plug the machine learning models.""The most valuable feature of IBM Cloud Pak for Data is the Modeler flows. The ability to develop models using a graphical approach and the capability to connect to various sources, as well as the data virtualization capabilities, allow me to easily access and utilize data that is dispersed across different sources."

More IBM Cloud Pak for Data Pros →

"The data storage requirement is reduced from the original database to the HANA database.""SAP HANA's best features are its programmability and extensibility - you can size and shape the software however you need.""SAP HANA's most valuable features are monitoring, reporting, and price and stock control.""The user interface is very good. You can do any kind of reporting analytics from the platform.""The in-memory computing and the efficient response time are very good features.""If you want to scale with new processes and new reports, that's fairly easy.""One feature I find very valuable, is the response time of the application on the database memory.""As I only worked part-time on SAP HANA, I did not have the opportunity to explore the advanced features of the solution. However, I did work with basic features, such as user administration and access controls for the accounting department. The feature that stood out to me the most was the Single Sign-On and user administration, backup, and server management. My experience with SAP HANA was mainly focused on basic server improvements."

More SAP HANA Pros →

Cons
"The tool depends on the control plane, an OpenShift container platform utilized as an orchestration layer...So, we have communicated this issue to IBM and asked if it is feasible to adapt the solution to work on a Kubernetes platform that we support.""The solution could have more connectors.""One thing that bugs me is how much infrastructure Cloud Pak requires for the initial deployment. It doesn't allow you to start small. The smallest permitted deployment is too big. It's a huge problem that prevents us from implementing the solution in many scenarios.""The technical support could be a little better.""The product must improve its performance.""There is a solution that is part of IBM Cloud Pak for Data called Watson OpenScale. It is used to monitor the deployed models for the quality and fairness of the results. This is one area that needs a lot of improvement.""One challenge I'm facing with IBM Cloud Pak for Data is native features have been decommissioned, such as XML input and output. Too many changes have been made, and my company has around one hundred thousand mappings, so my team has been putting more effort into alternative ways to do things. Another area for improvement in IBM Cloud Pak for Data is that it's more complicated to shift from on-premise to the cloud. Other vendors provide secure agents that easily connect with your existing setup. Still, with IBM Cloud Pak for Data, you have to perform connection migration steps, upgrade to the latest version, etc., which makes it more complicated, especially as my company has XML-based mappings. Still, the XML input and output capabilities of IBM Cloud Pak for Data have been discontinued, so I'd like IBM to bring that back.""The solution's user experience is an area that has room for improvement."

More IBM Cloud Pak for Data Cons →

"It could be a bit more scalable.""SAP HANA is not perfect and they could improve by having more options and more integration.""There's an issue in the partition. When you record more than two million records, partitioning does not work well. In Oracle it's easy. SAP must resolve this issue in order to be more competitive with Oracle.""Uses a large amount of RAM and is costly.""The relationship with a partner that sells SAP could be better. We depend much more on our own development, and the partner is for selling us the solutions, so we need them to be able to supply help and answers. The partner isn't very helpful, and we have to rely on our own knowledge and research.""FI, or the financial module of SAP, has room for improvement. It has to have some better localization for the Middle East, especially in regards to taxes and the letter of credit cycle. I would like to see better localization from the HCM.""Ease of use could be improved in SAP HANA. I like SAP because SAP solutions can be used by anyone, which means even laymen can start working on SAP tools, but in SAP HANA modeling, you'll need to know some other technologies and sequel scripting, and you need a separate skillset, so if you don't have the skillset, you won't be able to work on SAP HANA. Making SAP HANA low-code would make it even better.""The solution could improve in the handling of backup data and the administration tools."

More SAP HANA Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "I think that this product is too expensive for smaller companies."
  • "I don't have the exact licensing cost for IBM Cloud Pak for Data, as my company is still finalizing requirements, including monthly, yearly, and three-year licensing fees. Still, on a scale of one to five, I'd rate it a three because, compared to other vendors, it's more complicated."
  • "Cloud Pak's cost is a little high."
  • "IBM Cloud Pak for Data is expensive. If we include the training time and the machine learning, it's expensive. The cost of the execution is more reasonable."
  • "For the licensing of the solution, there is a yearly payment that needs to be made. Also, since it is expensive, cost-wise, I rate the solution an eight or nine out of ten."
  • "It's quite expensive."
  • "The solution is expensive."
  • More IBM Cloud Pak for Data Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "Set up a consortium of consulting partners and hardware vendors to define your tech. Landscape TCO (total cost of ownership) and then approach the OEM for pricing (on-premise or on cloud or a hybrid model). Check if you can bring your own licenses for some of the existing application licenses on the new platform, to reduce TCO."
  • "People who are technical will accept the cost, but financially they will assess whether this solution will bring them revenue or not. People often ask, how will I profit when the cost is so high?"
  • "It is expensive, which isn't a problem for us because SAP HANA is processing the data so fast."
  • "SAP HANA is an expensive product."
  • "It is expensive."
  • "Setup and licensing require planning and proper budgeting, as it is not cheap."
  • "The price of the solution could be reduced, it is expensive."
  • "The price of this product is good."
  • More SAP HANA Pricing and Cost Advice →

    report
    Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Data Virtualization solutions are best for your needs.
    767,847 professionals have used our research since 2012.
    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:DataStage allows me to connect to different data sources.
    Top Answer:The product must improve its performance. We see typical cloud-related issues in the solution. IBM can still focus more on keeping the performance up and keeping it 100% available all the time.
    Top Answer:Based on my work with SAP HANA, the biggest benefit that it can bring to your business is total data management. This product is by SAP - a company that serves almost all needs a client may have… more »
    Top Answer:We have been using SAP HANA for a fairly short period of time and have only taken advantage of their customer support. So far, we have not had issues that required specialized help from technical… more »
    Top Answer:SAP HANA is fairly easy to set up, however, I do not think a complete beginner can do it. You certainly need some preparation - either you need to have experience with similar solutions, or with other… more »
    Ranking
    3rd
    Views
    367
    Comparisons
    238
    Reviews
    10
    Average Words per Review
    546
    Rating
    8.3
    2nd
    Views
    367
    Comparisons
    297
    Reviews
    39
    Average Words per Review
    398
    Rating
    8.5
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Cloud Pak for Data
    SAP High-Performance Analytic Appliance, HANA
    Learn More
    Overview

    IBM Cloud Pak® for Data is a fully-integrated data and AI platform that modernizes how businesses collect, organize and analyze data to infuse AI throughout their organizations. Cloud-native by design, the platform unifies market-leading services spanning the entire analytics lifecycle. From data management, DataOps, governance, business analytics and automated AI, IBM Cloud Pak for Data helps eliminate the need for costly, and often competing, point solutions while providing the information architecture you need to implement AI successfully.

    Building on the streamlined hybrid-cloud foundation of Red Hat® OpenShift®, IBM Cloud Pak for Data takes advantage of the underlying resource and infrastructure optimization and management. The solution fully supports multicloud environments such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud™ and private cloud deployments. Find out how IBM Cloud Pak for Data can lower your total cost of ownership and accelerate innovation.

    SAP HANA, also known as SAP High-performance Analytics Appliance, is a multi-model database that stores data in its memory, allowing users to avoid disk storage. The product combines its robust database with services for creating applications. SAP HANA is faster than other database management systems (DBMS) because it stores data in column-based tables in main memory and brings online analytical processing (OLAP) and online transaction processing (OLTP) together.

    The column-oriented in-memory database design allows users to run high-speed transactions alongside advanced analytics, all in a single system. This provides companies with the ability to process very large amounts of data with low latency and query data in an instant. By combining multiple data management capabilities, the solution simplifies IT, helps businesses with innovations, and facilitates digital transformation.

    The solution is structured into five groups of capabilities, categorized as:

    • Database design
    • Database management
    • Application development
    • Advanced analytics
    • Data virtualization

    There are three more SAP products that work alongside SAP HANA and complete the experience for users together. SAP S/4HANA Cloud is a ready-to-run cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP). SAP BW/4HANA is a packaged data warehouse, based on SAP HANA, which allows users to consolidate data across the enterprise to get a consistent view of their data. Finally, SAP Cloud is a single database as a service (DBaaS) foundation for modern applications and analytics across all enterprise data. All three products can combine with SAP HANA to deliver to users an optimized experience regarding their data.

    SAP HANA Features

    Each architectural group of capabilities of SAP HANA has various features that users can benefit from. These include:

    • Parallel processing database: SAP HANA utilizes a single platform to run transactional and analytical workloads.

    • ACID compliance: This feature ensures compliance with requirements for Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability (ACID) standards.

    • Multi-tenancy: This feature allows multiple tenant databases to run in one system while sharing the same memory and processors.

    • Multi-tier storage and persistent memory support: SAP HANA's native storage extension is a built-in capability to manage between memory and persistent storage, including SAP HANA Cloud Data Lake.

    • Scaling: The scaling feature supports terabytes of data in a single server and distributes large tables across multiple servers in a cluster to scale further.

    • Data modeling: This feature consists of graphical modeling tools that enable collaboration between stakeholders and the creation of models to execute complex business logic and data transformation in real time.

    • Stored procedures: The product has a native language to build stored procedures and uses advanced capabilities to create complex logic.

    • Administration: This feature consists of administration tools for various platform lifecycle, performance, and management operations and automations.

    • Security: SAP HANA provides its users with real-time data anonymization features to extract value from data while protecting privacy.

    • Availability and recovery: The tool supports high availability and disaster recovery through an array of techniques, including backup, storage mirroring, synchronous, asynchronous, and multitarget system replication.

    • Extended application services: Through its built-in application server, users can develop services such as REST and ODATA, as well as web applications that can run on multiple locations.

    • Client access: The product offers clients the ability to access it via other application platforms and languages, including Java, JavaScript, R, and Go.

    • Application lifecycle management: This set of features facilitates the building and packaging of applications, transporting them for development to test to production, and then deploying them.

    • Application development: This feature consists of a set of tools that offer application development on premises and in the Cloud. The programming language ABAP includes additional optimized features to build extensions to SAP applications.

    • Search: The search feature uses SQL to locate text promptly across multiple columns and textual content.

    • Spatial processing: This product feature provides native support for spatial data types and spatial functions.

    • Graph: Through this feature, users of the product can store and process highly connected data using a property graph.

    • Streaming analytics: This feature combines various data sources that users can utilize to discover trends over a set period.

    • Data integration and replication: The solution offers comprehensive features to handle all data integration scenarios.

    • Data federation: This feature allows users to perform queries on remote data sources in real time with data federation.

    • Caching: The capacity to cache data provides users with the ability to optimize federated queries against remote sources of data.

    SAP HANA Benefits

    SAP HANA provides many benefits for its users. These include:

    • This solution offers a high level of data and application security, beginning from a secure setup and providing continuous support.

    • SAP HANA offers augmentation for applications and analytics with built-in machine learning (ML).

    • The solution works in a timely manner, as it provides a response to queries within seconds in large production applications.

    • SAP HANA simplifies work, as it provides a single gateway to all user data with advanced data virtualization.

    • The product is very flexible, as it allows users to deploy applications in a public or private cloud, in multiple clouds, on premises, or hybrid.

    • SAP HANA scales easily for data volume and concurrent users across a distributed environment.

    • This is a powerful solution in terms of querying large datasets with a massively parallel processing (MPP) database.

    • SAP HANA is a versatile product that supports hybrid transactional and analytical processing as well as many data types.

    • The product provides a smaller data footprint with no data duplication or advanced compression, and reduces data silos.

    Reviews from Real Users

    According to a database consultant at a pharma/biotech company, SAP HANA is a very robust solution with good data access.

    Bruno V., owner at LAVORO AUTOM INF E COM LTDA, likes SAP HANA because the product offers advanced features, helps reduce hours, and makes it easy to find what you need.

    Sample Customers
    Qatar Development Bank, GuideWell, Skanderborg Music Festival
    Unilever, NHS 24, adidas Group, CHIO Aachen, Hamburg Port Authority (HPA), Bangkok Airways Public Company Limited
    Top Industries
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm25%
    Computer Software Company11%
    Government8%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    REVIEWERS
    Manufacturing Company16%
    Computer Software Company14%
    Energy/Utilities Company10%
    Retailer8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company14%
    Manufacturing Company14%
    Financial Services Firm8%
    Comms Service Provider6%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business46%
    Large Enterprise54%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business17%
    Midsize Enterprise7%
    Large Enterprise76%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business25%
    Midsize Enterprise15%
    Large Enterprise60%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business19%
    Midsize Enterprise13%
    Large Enterprise67%
    Buyer's Guide
    IBM Cloud Pak for Data vs. SAP HANA
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Cloud Pak for Data vs. SAP HANA and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    767,847 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    IBM Cloud Pak for Data is ranked 3rd in Data Virtualization with 11 reviews while SAP HANA is ranked 2nd in Data Virtualization with 79 reviews. IBM Cloud Pak for Data is rated 8.0, while SAP HANA is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of IBM Cloud Pak for Data writes "A scalable data analytics and digital transformation tool that provides useful features and integrations". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SAP HANA writes "Excellent compatibility between modules and the control". IBM Cloud Pak for Data is most compared with IBM InfoSphere DataStage, Azure Data Factory, Informatica Cloud Data Integration, Palantir Foundry and Informatica PowerCenter, whereas SAP HANA is most compared with Oracle Database, SQL Server, MySQL and IBM Db2 Database. See our IBM Cloud Pak for Data vs. SAP HANA report.

    See our list of best Data Virtualization vendors.

    We monitor all Data Virtualization reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.