It's wise to contract with SAP for consulting help on a HANA project at this stage, according to early customers. In addition, it's possible to get direct feedback from SAP's product development team when issues crop up, users said. That may be harder to obtain over time if HANA sales ramp up as much as SAP hopes they will.

SAP has acquired just over since the product's launch, executives said this week during Tech Ed. However, "we should do better," co-CEO Bill McDermott said in a session with press and analysts at the event. "I think we are doing better every day."

The first 500 or 600 customers are "always the harder ones," he added. "Then when you have the early adopters and success stories, you can scale on a rapid basis. I think you're going to see HANA soar. The hard part is over."

TAMKO could end up serving as just the sort of success story McDermott cited.

"We're looking at HANA not so much from a [profit-and-loss] perspective, as a quick return on investment, but as a long-term foundation for the future," Martin said. "A couple years down the line, we see HANA as a central reporting tool for us."