Now that HANA is in place, the university is going to decommission a number of BI assets, including an Oracle data warehouse and an Informatica ETL (extract, transform and load) tool, which will generate savings.

Recktenwald offered peers who haven't purchased HANA yet one piece of advice: "Don't be afraid of it. It's similar enough to other database technologies that it's approachable."

However, "the caution, maybe, is to understand it's still a new product," he added. There are frequent patching cycles and when SAP finds new bugs that means the school has to arrange for time to apply them and perform testing.

Users should also temper their performance expectations, as not every query is necessarily going to run faster, he said.

With any new product, there will be a smaller group of early adopters closely watched by a much larger subset of the potential customer base, who either wait to see how the first group fares and the technology matures before making an investment or make only small steps toward adoption.