????SAP公司40年的歷史上發(fā)展最快的一款產(chǎn)品并不是商業(yè)軟件應用程序，它甚至都不是受這家德國公司聯(lián)席首席執(zhí)行官之命、誕生于公司龐大的研發(fā)實驗室體系之中的產(chǎn)品。相反，HANA，一種能加速復雜計算的新型內(nèi)存數(shù)據(jù)庫技術是由幾位大學生開發(fā)的，只不過得到了SAP聯(lián)合創(chuàng)始人兼董事長、69歲的哈索?普拉特納的力挺。早期，HANA被認為是“哈索的新架構”（ Hasso's New Architecture，取各單詞首字母縮寫為HANA——譯注）。

????SAP的許多核心業(yè)務應用已經(jīng)過改寫，以便在HANA上運行。但普拉特納——其父是一名醫(yī)生——對于HANA在醫(yī)療行業(yè)的發(fā)展前景格外興奮。上周早些時候，在硅谷一場個性化醫(yī)學大會上，普拉特納高度評價HANA，稱該技術能迅速計算海量醫(yī)學信息，例如基因組數(shù)據(jù)，以便為病人確定最佳治療方案。普拉特納稱，SAP將在“未來數(shù)月”推出一個基于HANA的醫(yī)療平臺。

????“醫(yī)生都是即時決策者，”普拉特納告訴聽眾。“所以系統(tǒng)必須速度非常快。”

????雖然HANA在SAP的整體營收中所占比例仍然相對較低，但它發(fā)展迅速，目前營收已達3.92億歐元。SAP已然將這項潛力無限的技術視為決勝未來的必勝法寶。SAP于上周公布了最新財報，公司聯(lián)席首席執(zhí)行官孟鼎銘隨后向《財富》（Fortune）補充道，HANA 2012年的營收中有近一半來自當年第四季度。“我們可以看到HANA形勢喜人。它正成為一個名副其實的品牌，一個廣為人知的解決方案。而一切才剛剛開始。”

????SAP預計HANA的銷售額在2013年有望增至7億歐元。雖然該技術前景一片大好，但包括SAP在內(nèi)的諸多公司必須為新平臺重寫產(chǎn)品代碼，這可是個費時費力的工作。不過普拉特納表示，SAP目前和將來的所有應用程序都會“支持HANA”，這項新技術用不了多久就會占據(jù)SAP至少20%的銷售額。

????當然，甲骨文（Oracle）依然是數(shù)據(jù)庫領域的老大，它的首席執(zhí)行官拉里?埃里森對HANA持不同看法。埃里森在去年曾譏諷普拉特納一定嗑藥了，竟然妄想和甲骨文競爭。他強調自己公司早在10年前就已開始對內(nèi)存數(shù)據(jù)庫的研究。普拉特納在上周早些時候接受《財富》采訪時回應稱：“我從不嗑藥。”SAP面臨的競爭對手并非只有甲骨文一家。憑借超級計算機沃森，IBM正大肆進軍醫(yī)療保健市場。沃森依靠與SAP類似的底層技術（例如并行計算等）以及人工智能幫助醫(yī)生診斷和治療患者。所有技術的出發(fā)點都一樣——用遠超人類的計算能力分析、梳理海量醫(yī)療數(shù)據(jù)。

????普拉特納擲地有聲地說：“最重要的是我們的速度更快。越快越好。”(財富中文網(wǎng))

????譯者：項航

????The fastest-growing product in SAP's 40-year history isn't a business software application, and it wasn't invented within the German company's massive research and development labs at the request of its co-CEOs. Rather, HANA, a new in-memory database technology capable of speeding up complex computations, was developed by a handful of university students and spearheaded by none other than SAP's 69-year-old co-founder and chairman, Hasso Plattner. In the early days, HANA was known as "Hasso's New Architecture".

????A number of SAP's (SAP) core business applications have already been rewritten to run on HANA. But Plattner, whose father was a doctor, is particularly excited about HANA's prospects in the healthcare industry. Earlier this week, at a personalized medicine conference in Silicon Valley, he touted HANA's abilities to quickly churn through massive amounts of medical information, like genomic data, in order to identify the best therapy for a patient. According to Plattner, SAP will launch a HANA-based healthcare platform in the "next few months."

????"Doctors are instant decision makers," Plattner told the audience." "And therefore the system has to be extremely fast."

????HANA has quickly grown into a 392 million euro business for SAP, though it still comprises a relatively small percentage of the company's total revenue. But SAP is already touting the uber-fast technology as a big success story. "You can see the acceleration," co-CEO Bill McDermott told Fortune after the company announced its latest earnings report last week, adding that about half of HANA's 2012 revenue came in the fourth quarter of last year. "It's becoming a real brand, and a well-known solution. And guess what, we're just getting started."

????SAP expects sales of HANA to reach upwards of 700 million euros in 2013. Though the technology is promising, it requires companies—including SAP—to rewrite applications for the new platform, a time-consuming task. But Plattner says all of SAP's current and future applications will be "HANA-rized," and that the technology will someday soon make up at least 20% of SAP's revenue.

????Of course, Larry Ellison, CEO of database leader Oracle (ORCL), has a different take on HANA's prospects. Last year he suggested Plattner must be on drugs to think he can compete with Oracle, saying his company has been working on in-memory technology for a decade. Plattner's response: "I never took drugs in my life," he said in an interview with Fortune earlier this week. But SAP doesn't have just Oracle to contend with. IBM (IBM) has already made a big push into healthcare with its Watson supercomputer, which relies on similar underlying technologies (like parallel processing) but also uses artificial intelligence to suggest diagnoses and therapies to doctors. Both technologies aim to comb through medical data much faster than a human physician can.

????"The major message is we can do things faster," says Plattner. "Faster is better."