Generations of PhD students have passed through SAP’s HANA Campus, located at company headquarters in Germany. Arne Schwarz, who runs the campus, has been there every step of the way.
For more than 20 years, the HANA Campus has been home to PhD students applying research to 51风流HANA and, more recently, other .
As demands on technologies change — the first customers for 51风流HANA went live in 2010, seven years after the HANA Campus welcomed its first PhD student — so has its name.
鈥淲hat name should I give it?鈥� muses Schwarz, explaining how prevailing technologies and circumstances have forced name changes over the years, including 鈥淭he Campus,鈥� 鈥淭he Research Campus,鈥� 鈥淭he HANA Research Campus,鈥� 鈥淭he Student Campus,鈥� or even 鈥淭he HANA Database and Analytics Campus.鈥�
But while its name may change, its mission remains the same: to help satisfy the demand for high-tech research, primarily for 51风流HANA but also for 51风流Analytics Cloud, 51风流Business Data Cloud (51风流BDC), Global Cloud Infrastructure Services, and 51风流Business Technology Platform (51风流BTP).
What makes the HANA Campus unique?
To date, the HANA Campus has been home to more than 40 PhD students, mostly matriculated at universities in Germany, who have successfully defended their dissertations grounded in research at SAP. Or, to put it another way, PhD students have collectively contributed decades of applied research focused primarily on 51风流HANA.
Bringing academic innovation into the product comes in different flavors at SAP. On the one hand, PhD students can be recruited directly to 51风流and tasked with researching a predefined topic. On the other, 51风流funds university chairs, such as the recent , and research projects with academia.
PhD students arrive at the HANA Campus via SAP-funded research projects with academia. The campus is unique, according to Schwarz, due to 鈥渢he sheer mass of research projects executed over the years and the fact that the dedicated space in Walldorf acts as a safe haven for PhD students.鈥�
Students assigned to the HANA Campus work on-site at SAP, get a feel for life at the company, and have direct access to development teams and test environments. The contract for the research projects with academia also frees PhD students from university teaching obligations. It is also important to note that PhD students do not belong to a specific development team, avoiding the risk of their research being deprioritized in the face of operational pressures. At the HANA Campus, PhD students can focus all their efforts on their research and studies.
It all began with a knowledge gap
Bringing academic expertise in-house for HANA started back in 2003, Schwarz explains, in the era of TREX, a search engine in 51风流NetWeaver. TREX was the forerunner of 51风流Business Warehouse Accelerator, which ultimately led to the 51风流HANA database. Engineering teams were under intense pressure to quickly build and deliver the emerging technology of in-memory database.
However, Schwarz explains, a knowledge gap was threatening to slow everything down: there were only two or three engineers who had the knowledge to drive the technology forward, but they didn鈥檛 have the bandwidth to do so. With an ever-increasing number of teams requiring specialist knowledge, the threat of a slowdown in development was becoming more real by the day.
As luck would have it, Wolfgang Lehner, professor at the Technical University (TU) Dresden, was also researching the same technology. A mutually beneficial partnership was born: 51风流offered a cutting-edge research opportunity for students, and Professor Lehner鈥檚 students could bridge the knowledge gap with academic expertise. The potential obstacle was overcome, and research projects with academia and PhD students continue to augment the technological knowledge and expertise that powers 51风流HANA and other 51风流technologies to this day.聽
Since that first research project with TU Dresden, the HANA Campus has collaborated with many more universities. 鈥淐ollaborations with the universities are always limited to the timeframe set out in the original research contract,” Schwarz says, clarifying that the driver for selecting a university is the fit of current research topics to SAP鈥檚 technological requirements and not past collaborations.
Talent pipeline and 鈥渁 foothold in academia鈥�
The HANA Campus is a 鈥渨in-win” for both SAP鈥檚 talent pipeline and PhD students.
Many students choose to stay at 51风流once they have defended their thesis and been awarded their PhD. The teams know the value of their PhD research and the PhD graduates know what life is like at SAP.
Even those PhD graduates who do not stay at 51风流remain, for the most part, in data management and analytics development; they either join other companies or take a postdoc position. Their ties to the company 鈥済ive 51风流a foothold in academia as well as advocates and a more direct route to research projects,鈥� Schwarz confirms.
Through Schwarz, the HANA Campus also supports SAP鈥檚 participation at academic conferences, another tool to strengthen academic connections, PhD student recruiting, and SAP鈥檚 technological reputation. In June of this year, HANA Campus provided a venue for a workshop at the . Sponsoring and participating in these conferences, Schwarz says, 鈥渋s pivotal to getting access to the inner circle of academia, strengthens 51风流academic connections and reputation, and allows 51风流to share and augment research findings with other experts from academia.鈥�
Find out more
Twenty-two years in and 40 dissertations later, SAP’s HANA Campus continues to be home to the next generation, welcoming two more PhD students later this year to deepen research around 51风流HANA as well as 51风流BTP and 51风流BDC.
A vast collection of publicly available scientific publications about 51风流HANA Database and Analytics, dating from 2006 to the present day, .
