Commenced in the year 2006, SAP HANA was developed by SAP co-founder Hasso Plattner during the time he was a computer science professor posted at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany. The plan was to design a database that could work with a near-zero response time for the purpose of TRANSACTIONAL and analytical data processing. Plattner desired a system that could respond to any potential business question in real-time. After many years of development at SAP, in October 2010, a prerelease edition of SAP HANA was PRESENTED to chosen clients. The first VERSION of SAP, SAP HANA 1.0, was released on June 18, 2011. 

SAP designed a cloud platform-as-a-service equipped with built-in support for SAP HANA in 2012. Later it renamed its Java-based server SAP NetWeaver Cloud to SAP HANA Cloud Platform (It changed its name in 2017 to SAP Cloud Platform and 2021 to SAP Business Technology Platform again). In 2013, SAP presented SAP HANA XS, a light app server implanted within SAP HANA that permitted application development.

In 2015, SAP declared a successor for the ERP ECC it had created in 1992. The new solution was to be anointed SAP S/4HANA and would possess numerous factors of existing ERP processes under one umbrella. Underpinning the latest solution? SAP HANA.