SAP was offering a Rapid Deployment Solution package for operational reporting on HANA, with "near real-time" data access, which the company decided to purchase, Martin said. SAP sells a series of RDS packages, which bundle up consulting services and specialized content with the goal of fast but targeted implementations.

In TAMKO's case, the HANA RDS didn't include the development of a security model, so the company had to bring in a security consultant at additional cost.

It's recommended that HANA customers think about security at an early stage of data model development, he added. "If you don't, you'll need to redesign your model later on."

The fact that TAMKO had to apply upgrades to HANA during the implementation process also proved very challenging at times.

Still, TAMKO got some positive results, including a 15-times improvement in SQL performance without any tuning.