Yesterday SAP had a press conference where they announced some interesting things about how SAP HANA can now be consumed in easier and easier ways.
The key drivers for this seemed to be the reduction in price for hardware that will support HANA – this should be no surprise as this is Moore’s Law in action. To help customers appreciate this and keep them informed about pricing trends SAP has created a space on the SAPHANA.com site to show approximate prices for various hardware configurations which you can see here. To give this some perspective, last year I know that a 256Gb machine cost $100,000 this chart show it available for $11,278 !!
Another change is the pricing model for SAP HANA, we didn’t get details, but the idea is to unbundle all the services that come round the SAP HANA DB so that you can build the platform up of the components that add value to your use-case.
I hope that these two coupled together with help to drop the “entry point” for productive HANA to a level where everyone can start to innovate on top of HANA (I guess SAP do too 
).
To further reduce friction in the innovation process SAP announced further improvements to the SAP HANA Marketplace so you can either bring your own licence or pay a subscription. The managed hardware with the entry level 128Gb system costing $1,595 and 1TB costing $6,495 per month. The subscription licence with 2 versions of HANA available – base and platform - range from $4,595 (Base/128Gb) to $83,295 (Platform/1TB).
With both SAP River and SAPUI5/OpenUI5 (the special sauce that powers SAP Fiori) available to build apps on top of this platform SAP hope that the SAP HANA Marketplace will soon be full of innovative partner apps for you to download……the information above certainly removes many of the barriers to entry…..only the hard part of actually being innovate is left. As a proof point SAP announced that the start ups that it has been helping round HANA have already generated in excess of $10 Million in revenue.
Well done to Vishal and the team at SAP who are proving that SAP can be Fast and Fiorious. Also congratulations on the Guinness world record for the largest Data Warehouse and 12.1 PB !!
Finally when is "Help Help me HANA" by the Beach Boy going to be number 1 - I couldn't find it on iTunes or YouTube.