SAP is not a hardware company. That fact is helping fuel a rush of new server hardware platforms and features from IBM, Cisco and HP that are designed to leverage SAP’s HANA, the in-memory database software technology which the software giant expects to yield $386 million in revenues this year.
SAP HANA runs on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and is a core component of SAP’s overall application delivery approach. It’s an approach that the big server vendors want to enhance with their own respective hardware offerings.