SAP's fastest-selling product of all time, known as HANA, may not be as growing as fast as the company says, according to one Wall Street analyst.
SAP may have "inflated" the growth figures, says analyst Peter Goldmacher of Cowen and Co., as reported by AllThingsD's Arik Hesseldahl.
HANA is a realtime in-memory database appliance and SAP has been using it to attack and steal business from its long-time foe, Oracle.
SAP executives have not only called HANA the fastest-growing product in the history of SAP, co-CEO Bill McDermott said it was "the fastest growing software product in the history of the world."
Goldmacher questions this in his research report:
“If we take management at its word and believe that HANA’s two-year license growth [rate] through FY13 is about 120 percent, then this means that the other 90 percent of SAP’s license business, Apps and BI, is growing at … roughly 2 percent, materially below category growth rates ... Our research and experience lead us to believe that SAP is allocating product revenue subjectively and that this is resulting in an inflated HANA growth rate.”
UPDATED: SAP lumps all of its software products together into one unit, which includes HANA, mobile, other wares. It has been reporting HANA's revenues separately in the text of its financial documents, but not as a seperate line item in the tables. (It says HANA's 2011 full year revenue: €160 million, 2012 full year: €392 million.)
SAP can manipulate the growth rate by bundling products together, offering big discounts on its bread-and-butter apps, while charging full price for HANA, Goldmacher says.
This makes it look like revenue for HANA is growing fast, but that growth is really coming, at least in part, from sales of SAP's other products.
SAP spokesperson Jim Dever says that the analyst has it wrong.
"Roughly half of HANA business is stand-alone deals, HANA and nothing else. We think his report could not be more inaccurate in its assumptions," he told Business Insider. "We have been consistent in our HANA pricing, our no-discount policy, and our reporting of growth rates and revenue results – and have no changes to announce."
SAP says that its entire software line is growing. Its outlook is 11-13% revenue growth in software and software-related services and 14-20% revenue growth for software and cloud subscriptions.
The company reports earnings on April 19 and no doubt we'll hear more about this then.
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