Book excerpt: SAP HANA is the SAP product for in-memory computing. It streamlines transactions, analytics, planning, and data processing on a single in-memory database allowing businesses to operate in real-time. Over the course of the last few years, the authors have led many diverse SAP HANA projects with extraordinary success resulting in 10,000, or in some cases even 100,000, times improvement of system performance. In this book, the authors share their findings from SAP HANA projects to help ensure the success of your SAP HANA project. The SAP HANA project guide will also help you identify suitable scenarios for your company to get started with in-memory computing, while sketching out a long term plan to provide innovation to your entire business using SAP HANA. We’ll cover the following key topics: - Delivering innovation with SAP HANA - Creating a business case for SAP HANA - Thinking in-memory - Managing SAP HANA projects