Generations of doctoral students have passed through SAP’s HANA Campus at the company’s headquarters in Germany. Arne Schwarz, who manages the campus, has been there from the beginning.
For more than 20 years, doctoral students at the HANA Campus have been researching SAP HANA and, more recently, others Technologies.
The demands placed on technology are constantly changing – the first customers for SAP HANA put the technology into operation in 2010, seven years after the HANA Campus welcomed the first doctoral students. The name of the SAP research institute also changed accordingly.
“What should the child be called?” “You had to think about it again and again,” explains Schwarz. Over the years, current technologies and circumstances have led to various name changes: “The Campus”, “The Research Campus”, “The HANA Research Campus”, “The Student Campus” or “The HANA Database and Analytics Campus”.
Despite all the changing names, the mission of the campus always remained the same: to meet the demand for high-tech research. Although the focus is on SAP HANA, other technologies are also being researched, such as SAP Analytics Cloud, SAP Business Data Cloud (SAP BDC), Global Cloud Infrastructure Services and the SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP).
What is special about the HANA Campus?
To date, over 40 doctoral students have worked at the HANA Campus. As a rule, they are enrolled at German universities and obtain their doctorate based on their research work at SAP. In other words: The doctoral students have been conducting applied research together for decades, mainly in the area of SAP HANA.
Academic innovations flow into SAP products in various ways: On the one hand, doctoral students are brought directly to SAP to work on a given research topic. On the other hand, SAP also finances professorships at universities such as the current one Hasso Plattner Endowed Chair for Artificial Intelligence as well as research projects with universities.
Doctoral students come to the HANA Campus through SAP-funded research projects with universities. There won’t be anything like the campus again, says Schwarz. The reason is “the large number of research projects carried out over the years and the fact that the specially designed campus in Walldorf is a kind of ‘safe haven’ for doctoral students.”
HANA Campus students work on site at SAP, get to know everyday life in the company and have direct access to development teams and test environments. The contract for the research projects with the universities also stipulates that the doctoral students have no teaching obligations at universities. It is also important: the doctoral students do not belong to a specific development team. This means there is no risk of their research being put aside due to operational requirements. On the HANA Campus, doctoral students can concentrate entirely on their research and academic work.
It all started with a lack of know-how
According to Schwarz, bringing academic know-how into the company and incorporating it into SAP HANA began in 2003, at the time of TREX, a search engine in SAP NetWeaver. TREX is considered the forerunner of the SAP Business Warehouse Accelerator and ultimately led to the SAP HANA database. At the time, development teams were under intense pressure to quickly develop and deploy the fledgling in-memory database technology.
But, according to Schwarz, a lack of resources threatened to slow down the process: only two or three employees in development were familiar with it, but did not have the capacity to advance the technology sufficiently. With the ever-increasing number of teams requiring specialist knowledge, the risk of a development backlog became ever greater.
As luck would have it, Professor Wolfgang Lehner from the Technical University of Dresden was also researching this technology. This created a partnership from which both sides benefited: SAP offered students state-of-the-art research opportunities, and Professor Lehner’s students were able to bridge the knowledge gap with their academic specialist knowledge. This meant that the potential obstacle was overcome, and to this day research projects with universities and doctoral students enrich SAP HANA and other SAP technologies with their specialist knowledge.
Since this first research project with TU Dresden, the HANA Campus has collaborated with many other universities. “Collaboration with universities is always limited to the term specified in the research contract,” explains Schwarz. The decisive factor in selecting a university is that its current research topics fit the technological requirements of SAP, not previous collaborations.
Talent pipeline and “a gateway to science”
The HANA Campus is a win-win situation – for SAP’s talent pipeline as well as for doctoral students.
Many doctoral students stay at SAP after completing their dissertation. The teams appreciate the value of their research, and the doctoral students know what it’s like to work at SAP.
Even those who don’t stay at SAP usually continue to work in data management and analytics and go to other companies or take a postdoctoral position. The connection to SAP remains and “opens up a gateway for SAP to science, more direct access to research projects and advocates in the academic environment,” explains Schwarz.
Through Schwarz, the HANA Campus also supports SAP’s participation in scientific conferences. This is another tool to strengthen relationships with universities, attract new doctoral students and strengthen SAP’s reputation as a technology company. In June of this year, the HANA Campus was the venue for a workshop SIGMOD/PODS International Conference on Management of Data. Sponsoring and participating in such conferences, says Schwarz, “is crucial to gaining access to the inner circle of universities, strengthening SAP’s relationships with universities and its reputation, and exchanging and complementing research results with academic experts.”
More information
22 years and 40 dissertations later, the HANA Campus is home to the next generation of doctoral students. Two more doctoral students will join us this year to deepen research in the areas of SAP HANA, SAP BTP and SAP BDC.
An extensive collection of scientific publications about the SAP HANA database and analytics from 2006 to the present is publicly available on GitHub.
