Analysts are more restrained in their assessments of HANA, in part, because of a tug of war between so-called engineered systems, represented by something like Oracle's Exadata platform, and systems that use x86 hardware platforms such as HANA.

Whether the one-year-old succeeds for SAP may depend, in part, on whether it gets new customers for the company. University of Kentucky is already an SAP customer.

But none of these tech industry issues change how the university used SAP's in-memory technology to reshape its .

Kullen said the university was searching for ways to improve retention rates of its students and boost number of students who graduate.

The university collects detailed data about student retention at various stages of academic progress. It has course history, grades, class attendance data from the classes that track it, and engagement data -- a measure of student participation in virtual classroom spaces, including discussions and assignment downloads.