At SAPPHIRE NOW 2014 in Orlando, Bernd Leukert, (member of the SAP Executive Board with global responsibility for development and delivery of all products) made an announcement for which most of the community of IBM Power Systems customers, sellers and integrators have been waiting for a long time.  He announced the testing and evaluation program for HANA on IBM Power Systems (HoP).  As SAP has done with virtually every product they have introduced in the past, they will work with a select group of customers that have the interest, skills, experience and willingness to dedicate the time to thoroughly put a product through its paces to ensure that it will deliver the value necessary to customers, operate efficiently and without error and perform at an acceptable level.  Often, this is called Ramp-up and usually, unless critical problems are found, it is followed by an announcement of General Availability (GA).  During…