SAP Speeds Up With Its Hana Database Software - Businessweek

Evidently some data mining required to determine the real SAP HANA results picture, according to the second page of this article

"But the most dramatic change ushered in by Sikka is Hana, a new type of database software SAP released in June 2011. Typically, SAP has competed in the business applications portion of the software market, leaving databases and hard-core analytics to other companies such as Oracle (ORCL) and IBM (IBM). Hana, though, is a so-called in-memory database that’s turned SAP into a serious data-crunching contender. Instead of keeping a company’s prized data—be it sales numbers, inventory, or customer information—on a slow, spinning hard disk, Hana stores data on high-speed memory chips. This approach costs a bit more, but the result is a system that can sort through huge volumes of data in seconds rather than hours."

SAP Speeds Up With Its Hana Database Software - Businessweek