SAP AG has announced a range of innovations. The announcements put heavy emphasis on SAP HANA, and focus on three main areas, David Jonker, director of product marketing - Data Management & Analytics, SAP, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
The announcements include general availability of Service Pack 4 for SAP HANA; the first results from HP and SAP of a new enhanced mixed load (EML) benchmark; and collaboration with HP to offer HP AppSystem for SAP HANA and SAP Rapid Deployment solutions. SAP also unveiled new access to HANA development sandbox in the public cloud via Amazon Web Service, and the next step in a program encouraging startups to develop on SAP HANA.
Helping customers accelerate existing SAP landscapes:
- SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse (SAP NetWeaver BW) application, which became generally available in April 2012, had the most successful early adoption program in SAP history, according to the company. "We announced back on April 10 that SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse was certified to use SAP HANA and we are actually bringing forth a number of customers at SAPPHIRE that are talking about what their results based on their deployment," notes Jonker.
- Another key announcement for customers is a new partnership between SAP and HP to help companies process and analyze higher volumes of data from business-critical applications to drive innovation with HP AppSystems for SAP HANA, says Jonker. The new scale-out solution of HP AppSystems for SAP HANA is a pre-integrated, tested and supported converged system featuring servers, storage, networking and management software. It is the first enterprise-class real-time analytics solution optimized to run SAP business application workloads while offering an automated failover mechanism for high availability and disaster tolerance technology. It includes HP ProLiant BladeSystem BL680c servers and the HP X9300 IBRIX Network Storage System with HP P6500 Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA).
According to SAP, Hilti Corporation, a provider of technology for the global construction industry, is one of the first organizations planning to run 30TB of data from SAP NetWeaver BW powered by SAP HANA on the HP AppSystem for SAP HANA.
- And, in order to reflect customer requirements which demand greater ad hoc query capabilities on real-time data, SAP has developed a new standard application benchmark for the SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse (SAP NetWeaver BW) application called the enhanced mixed load (EML) benchmark, which it says is the first to provide a standard performance measurement of near real-time, ad hoc analysis and reporting on continuously updated data.
HP is the first partner to deliver a certified result for this new EML benchmark, showcasing SAP NetWeaver BW on SAP HANA running on HP AppSystem for SAP HANA for high-performance analytics with near real-time data sets.
Supporting customers' big data requirements:
- The newest service pack for SAP HANA (Service Pack 4) offers new functionality that helps customers deal with big data, says Jonker, including native text searching capabilities on structured and unstructured content, seamless and optimized interoperability with the open source statistical environment R, and additional in-database predictive and business functions for rapid deployment and faster processing. SAP HANA also provides interoperability with the open source Apache Hadoop technologies.
Working with customers, partners and startups on new innovation:
- Developer instances of SAP HANA are now available on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform, enabling developers to access to the in-memory technology from SAP through an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). Developers who sign up are able to run their own pre-configured HANA instance to create their data analysis application. Along with a host of third-party development tools already available on AWS, this compelling and attractive solution is a major step for SAP to build-out the global ecosystem of SAP HANA developers. Developers can sign-up through the "SAP HANA Developer Center" page of SAP Community Network.
- The SAP Startup Focus program is designed to enable startups to innovate on SAP HANA as their underlying platform of choice. The 10 startups currently in the accelerator program focus on areas as diverse as social media analytics from NextPrinciples and Passenger, to industry-specific solutions fromOptessa, Nexvisionix, Basis Technologies and AlertEnterprise. Space-Time Insight and Ankhor Software offer new ways of visualizing data while Zettaset offers an integration solution for SAP HANA and Hadoop. For specific reports, the performance improvements the startups have seen with SAP HANA have ranged from 300 times to cases as extreme as Taulia's, which managed to reduce risk analysis business process from two to five days to under three seconds. These startups are showcasing their applications at SAPPHIRE NOW onsite in the "SAP HANA Test Drive" area.
- And, to further underscore the company's intention to deliver SAP HANA as a platform for development, SAP says the SAP Startup Focus program is closely aligned with the new $155 million "SAP HANA Real-Time Fund" to identify and foster such startups on an ongoing basis.For more information, visit the SAP Startup Focus program page on www.sap.com.