Jun 052013
 

SAP announced that it has plans to acquire hybris. The acquisition positions SAP to deliver the next-generation e-commerce platform, with the choice of on-premise or cloud deployment, as enterprises around the world seek to optimize the customer experience for businesses and consumers across an ever-growing number of delivery channels, devices and touch points.

The combination of industry-leading enterprise solutions from SAP with the agile omni-channel commerce solutions of hybris will provide enterprises with the enhanced data and tools necessary to optimize margins and customer loyalty. With a holistic view of the customer relationship, SAP solutions help enterprises manage the full spectrum of customer engagement — across sales, service, marketing and commerce — while maintaining understanding and intimacy through social channels.

“hybris puts SAP on the leading edge of the consumer economy,” said Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe, co-CEOs, SAP AG. “With hybris, SAP has made a decisive move to raise the stakes in customer relationship management and define the next generation customer experience.”

The combination of hybris’ commerce platform with the flagship in-memory platform SAP HANA, analytical and cloud applications, and the SAP Jam social software platform will give SAP a significant edge in delivering new levels of customer insight and engagement across all channels.

Conference Call
SAP senior management will host a conference call for media and analysts today, Wednesday, June 5, at 6:00 p.m. CET / 12:00 p.m. EDT / 9:00 a.m. PDT. The call will be webcast at www.sap.com/investor.

Read press release

May 242013
 

SAP announced today that it will create a single development organization for existing and new products, drive a cloud-first approach for the development of line-of-business applications, increase SAP’s leadership in mobile and further accelerate the company’s go-to-market for cloud and the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud service.

In a nut shell here are the changes in management:

  1. All SAP development and custom development efforts will be managed by Vishal Sikka (@vsikka), member of the executive board, Technology & Innovation.
  2. Bernd Leukert (@leukertb), EVP for application innovation has been nominated to the global managing board.  Bernd will strength SAP’s global development organization reporting Vishal Sikka.
  3. SAP Executive Board Member Gerhard Oswald will take responsibility for a new scale, quality and support board area. Oswald will be responsible for the operations of SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud. Oswald will continue to be responsible for the SAP Active Global Support organization, the SAP Labs network (jointly with Sikka) and Solution and Knowledge Packaging.
  4. Lars Dalgaard will step down from the Executive Board and leave the company to become an investor. He will continue to play an active role as an advisor to the SAP Cloud business and will stay closely involved in the future development of SAP’s cloud strategy.
  5. SAP Co-CEOs Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe (@jim_snabe) will become Executive Board sponsors for SAP’s cloud business.
  6. SAP will consolidate its cloud go-to-market under the leadership of Bob Calderoni , CEO of Ariba, an SAP company, president of Global Cloud Operations and member of the Global Managing Board of SAP AG. Bob will continue to lead the Ariba business network activities.
  7. Luisa Delgado, member of the Executive Board, Human Resources, and Labor Relations Director, has decided to leave SAP.
  8. SAP Executive Board Member Werner Brandt will take on the Executive Board responsibility for Human Resources and become the Labor Relations Director in Germany in addition to his role as chief financial officer.
  9. Luka Mucic will become head of Finance to support Brandt in his expanded responsibilities. The Executive Board has nominated Mucic to the Global Managing Board.

Watch a webcast about the announcement (webcast will be available by May 25 at 8:00am ET).

Read full press release.

May 072013
 

 

enterprise-cloud-graphic-no-rule

SAP announced that SAP HANA is now on the cloud via service SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud.  Now companies can run their mission critical applications in a managed cloud all on SAP HANA.  Here is a collection of links that talks about what was announced.

Quotes from Vishal Sikka during the press conference:

“HANA cloud already has business intelligence, analytics, business warehouse, CRM systems.”

“HANA Enterprise cloud is for HANA only. Previous generation databases are not welcome here.”

“Workday and SalesForce.com will benefit a lot by moving to Hana cloud.”

Apr 292013
 
SteveLucas_pic

Join SAP’s Steve Lucas and Partha Chakraborty from IBM as they talk about SAP HANA at an SAP Insider webinar.  The two will answer questions about SAP HANA and why it is one of the hottest stopics within the SAP community.

Date: Tuesday, April 30

Time: 9:00am EST

How: SAP Insider

Oct 232012
 

There was  a lot of activity at SAP TechEd last week.  The tech geeks at the conference were giving more free access to HANA and tools to build apps onto HANA.

SAP’s Vishal Sikka reflects on the announcements made at TechEd Vegas and how technology is changing our world in a blog post, What a Week!!

Oct 152012
 

Today, Monday, October 15 will open TechEd Vegas with a keynote from Clay Shirky, “one of the finest thinkers on the Internet revolution”. 

Clay Shirky Keynote
Time: 5:45pm PST / 8:45pm EST

Geek jammers started their TechEd yesterday by attending InnoJam. TechEd Vegas InnoJam is focused on building applications for a healthier world. The participants will spend 30-hours straight to design and develop their applications.  keynote. The presentation of the InnoJam teams will be broadcasted live.

InnoJam Presentations
Time: 7:00pm PST / 10:00pm EST

Watch TechEd 2012 now!

Jun 212012
 

SAP and Cisco entered into a global reseller agreement, whereby SAP will offer its customers the SAP IT Process Automation application by Cisco. SAP IT Process Automation by Cisco tells an IT department when a system is likely to go or has already gone down, and also detects incidents with non-SAP systems. This automation software will provide customers better control of their IT operational processes in complex IT environments. The new solution can help keep outages to a minimum, increasing operational efficiency and promoting service-level success while minimizing IT upkeep efforts.

SAP IT Process Automation Delivers High Service Quality Across Heterogeneous IT Landscapes SAP IT Process Automation integrates with SAP solutions, including the SAP ERP application, SAP Solution Manager, the SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse application and the SAP HANA platform.

Read more about the new solution.

Learn more about Cisco as an SAP partner and customer.

May 162012
 
ORLANDO — SAP today announced advanced support and integration with Hadoop environments including an expanded “big data” partner council and customer showcases. These “big data” integration capabilities are planned in SAP Data Services and SAP Information Steward software with the release of service pack 4 for the SAP HANA platform. SAP also showcased game-changing business results among customers, made possible by “big data” implementations based on the SAP real-time data platform. The announcement was made at SAPPHIRE NOW, being held in Orlando, Florida, May 14-16, 2012. The SAP real-time data platform, based on the flagship SAP HANA platform, includes data management capabilities from SAP Sybase IQ, SAP Sybase ESP, SAP Sybase ASE and SAP Enterprise Information Management. It unlocks business value from “big data” by providing for real-time decision support within the window of opportunity with extreme capabilities to ingest, store and process big data in real-time. “Groundbreaking innovations like SAP HANA help our customers access and deliver information at unprecedented speeds — up to 100,000 times faster than before — and empower them with fundamentally new ways to run their businesses and master ‘big data,’” said Steve Lucas, global executive vice president and general manager, Database & Technology, SAP “The SAP real-time data platform delivers an information value chain that uncovers and harnesses the right information at the right moment by moving data among SAP HANA, SAP Sybase IQ and Hadoop file systems.” Customer Showcases “Big Data” Results Powered by SAP HANA MITSUI KNOWLEDGE INDUSTRY analyzes genomes for cancer research and treatment. By building an information value chain that uses SAP HANA with R, open source programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics, for real-time analysis and Hadoop for preprocessing DNA sequences, the company found a way to shorten the genome analysis time from several days down to only 20 minutes. “Going from a process measured in days to one measured in minutes is radically transforming our customer relationships,” said Yukihisa Kato, CTO and director, MITSUI KNOWLEDGE INDUSTRY. “Using the SAP real-time data platform with SAP HANA at its core will be critical to our DNA going forward and to future business growth.” SAP Enterprise Information Management Solutions to Power Access to All “Big Data” Sources SAP envisions SAP Data Services and SAP Information Steward as the industry’s first and only unified solution for data quality, data integration, text data processing, data profiling and metadata management. The company aims to allow users to unlock the full business potential of “big data” by making it easier to integrate and synthesize information across an enterprise’s SAP and non-SAP applications. SAP Data Services and SAP Information Steward are intended to provide both business users and IT with an intuitive and comprehensive information management solution with planned enhancements that include:
  • Hadoop integration: reading from and loading to Hive and Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), rapid batch updating and loading to SAP HANA, SAP Sybase IQ server and any other data store, resulting in faster performance
  • Text data processing: extending the data view to analyze data sources by performing linguistic analysis and extracting relevant content from files, Web logs and social media
  • Authoritative and trustworthy data: helping users understand, assess and improve the quality of data by integrating data quality scorecards directly within business intelligence (BI) and enterprise applications so users can immediately determine the accuracy of the data and if necessary take corrective action
“Our goal is to help organizations access build and govern information value chains across all data sources,” said Lucas. “With our enterprise information management solutions, customers will have the ability to easily understand and access any data source — be it from an SAP, custom or partner application, enterprise database or new data sources such as Hadoop — so they can now better manage information throughout the organization.” SAP Extends “Big Data” Partner Ecosystem SAP has set up a “big data” partner council that will co-innovate to produce solutions uncovering use cases and architectures that leverage the SAP real-time data platform and Hadoop. The council will include a cross-section of companies, including startups, hardware vendors, software providers and technology services organizations that will collaborate together with SAP on select projects in the SAP Co-Innovation Lab. The cornerstone of this strategy is building a strong integration with the Hadoop ecosystem, starting with Cloudera, the leading provider of enterprise-grade Hadoop data management software, services and training. By co-innovating with Cloudera, the top contributor to the Hadoop development community, SAP plans to enable customers to go beyond business analytics and into the world of next-generation applications that innovate on data and open the door to myriad new possibilities. “We are very excited to work with SAP to provide customers with real-time insights from their Hadoop environments using our complementary solutions,” said Mike Olson, co-founder and CEO, Cloudera. “The SAP real-time data platform, combined with the Cloudera Hadoop Distribution, will deliver unmatched capabilities in next-generation ‘big data’ applications and analytics to the enterprise.” SAP today also announced a number of innovations on the SAP HANA platform. For more information, see “SAP Continues to Expand Capabilities and Scale of SAP HANA Platform and Ease Developer Adoption.” For announcements, blog posts, videos and other coverage during SAPPHIRE NOW, visit the Events Newsroom. SAPPHIRE NOW With SAPPHIRE NOW, SAP offers its customers, partners and prospects even more opportunities to engage in dialogue with peers, participants and thought leaders around the globe. Being held in Orlando, Florida, May 14-16, 2012, this enhanced, real-time event connects attendees on site with global participants through state-of-the-art broadcast studios and an online experience that incorporates the latest social media and community functionality. Whether on site or online, participants can gain insight as to how SAP is delivering on its product strategy and helping organizations around the world to run better. For more information, visit www.sapphirenow.com. Follow SAPPHIRE NOW on Twitter at @SAPPHIRENOW and visit the Events Newsroom at www.events.news-sap.com. Note to Editors: Webcasts, announcements, media roundtables, keynote presentations and blog posts from SAPPHIRE NOW will be available in the Events Newsroom at: www.events.news-sap.com. To preview and download broadcast-standard stock footage and press photos digitally, please visit www.sap.com/photos. On this platform, you can find high-resolution material for your media channels. To view video stories on diverse topics, visit www.sap-tv.com. From this site, you can embed videos into your own Web pages, share video via email links and subscribe to RSS feeds from SAP TV. Follow SAP on Twitter at @sapnews. For more information, press only: Samantha Finnegan, +1 (650) 276-9350, samantha.finnegan@sap.com, PDT Jeff Neal, +1 (925) 236-5035, jeff.neal@sap.com, PDT SAP Press Office, +49 (6227) 7-46315, CET; +1 (610) 661-3200, EDT; press@sap.com Anthony Suarez, Burson-Marsteller, +1 (212) 614-4331, anthony.suarez@bm.com, EDT During SAPPHIRE NOW (from May 14 to 16), to speak with press contacts on site, please dial the SAP press room: +1 (610) 661-0469.  
May 162012
 

ORLANDO — SAP today announced intuitive software that turns data into answers for people across organizations. SAP Visual Intelligence software allows employees, departments and lines of business to creatively visualize and analyze information and apply it to individual and group decision-making. A desktop version of SAP BusinessObjects Explorer software, SAP Visual Intelligence is powered by the SAP HANA platform and empowers users to perform data discovery regardless of technical skill level. With the new application, business users can take advantage of existing data investments that their IT organizations have built and maintained without tasking IT to produce reports. The announcement was made at SAPPHIRE NOW, being held in Orlando, Florida, May 14-16, 2012.

No matter where users sit in a company, they want a way to easily explore, mash up and share information to make better decisions and find new opportunities without having to task IT to deliver reports. Companies are also looking to maximize existing business intelligence (BI) investments; expanding access allows more people to take advantage of a wealth of existing data and systems to make better-informed decisions.

“The category of visual data discovery has become a must-have component of the BI tool portfolio and SAP has upped its capabilities with its latest product, SAP Visual Intelligence,” said Cindi Howson, founder, BI Scorecard. “Ease of use, time to insight and business agility are key reasons for the rapid growth of visual data discovery that provides users with greater self service with minimal IT support. SAP BusinessObjects Explorer provided ease of use, but the release of SAP Visual Intelligence brings greater flexibility and richer analysis.”

“3M is a diversified company consisting of six different businesses units operating across various industries globally. As a result, we are a data-rich organization that relies on SAP to deliver intuitive BI solutions,” said Jeff Robinson, IT manager, Global Business Intelligence, 3M.  “SAP Visual Intelligence puts our people in the driver’s seat because they can truly discover data on the fly. And because SAP handles the work of combining multiple data sources backed by in-memory technology, self-service analysis hits our users’ screens in seconds.”

Empowering Users in Any Industry or Line of Business to Explore Data and Find Answers
SAP Visual Intelligence draws upon the company’s expertise in 24 industries, 10 lines of business and global footprint to deliver a product that any company can use to deliver answers to users everywhere. For example:

  • A loan officer at a bank might wonder how the bank is performing regionally across multiple categories of loans and demographics. Typically this would involve intensive efforts downloading and bringing together information from corporate as well as public data sources to find answers, which would be done manually each time a refresh is needed. SAP Visual Intelligence enables the loan officer to create an automated routine to download census information, combine it with regional loan data as well as additional region and state details to enrich the data. The information could be immediately plotted on a map to discover that loan business had increased 25 percent in the past two years for high-income earners in a specific zip code but new loan applications had slowed significantly. At the next meeting, the team could put together a new campaign targeting sales of loans in the high income areas.
  • Responsible for analyzing the numbers of defects across plants and suppliers, a business analyst at a global manufacturing firm could use SAP Visual Intelligence to pull enterprise data as well as external data files sent by suppliers. A mash up of the data might reveal that specific parts and one particular supplier are responsible for 80 percent of the defects. As a result, the engineering team could work with the supplier on correcting the issues.
  • A regional manager for a healthy snack company might be tasked with increasing sales of a new health bar in the western region. Working with a business analyst and SAP Visual Intelligence, the regional manager could easily access sales numbers for the last three years and combine this with point of sale data to see that the majority of sales were coming from small stores running a new campaign. On the spot, the regional manager and business analyst could expand the campaign to a broader market and eliminate poorly performing campaigns.

Fast, Engaging Way of Finding Answers Buried in Massive Amounts of Data
Building on SAP BusinessObjects Explorer, SAP Visual Intelligence leverages SAP HANA to help users ignite their creativity with beautiful and interactive visualizations, allowing them to ask any question without the need for predefined queries, reports or dashboards. SAP Visual Intelligence removes roadblocks to information so business users can find real-time answers on any volume of data. The engaging interface increases the usage of data and ability to derive answers and make better decisions. SAP Visual Intelligence enables ad-hoc discovery everywhere, across all data — from spreadsheets to sales, finance, marketing, customer, social, geo-location, third-party and other business data.

Analytics Innovations Revolutionize the Decision-Making Process
Recognized as the BI market share leader by Gartner, today’s announcement is another of example of SAP’s commitment to investing and expanding its analytics portfolio to respond to the needs of customers and the market. Recently announced SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analysis software is intended to help users improve decision-making by predicting future outcomes. Additional planned enhancements to SAP BusinessObjects BI solutions aim to deliver more mobile analytics options, richer insight, improved collaborative decision-making and deeper SAP applications integration. The improved capabilities are planned to help companies extract the most business value from the massive amounts of data that are generated today.

“SAP Visual Intelligence revolutionizes decision-making by offering every person in an organization a fast and extremely easy to use  way of discovering answers from any data,” said John Schweitzer, senior vice president and general manager, Analytics, SAP. SAP solutions for analytics empower people with precise information anytime and anywhere using beautiful visualizations, enabling rapid response to events as they unfold. SAP delivers a powerful and comprehensive analytics portfolio that helps companies adapt to constant change so they can achieve remarkable results.”

For more information and demos about SAP Visual Intelligence, visit www.experienceexplorer.com. For a closer look, see: “Screenshots: SAP Broadens Analytics Reach.”

For announcements, blog posts, videos and other coverage during SAPPHIRE NOW, visit the Events Newsroom.

SAPPHIRE NOW
With SAPPHIRE NOW, SAP offers its customers, partners and prospects even more opportunities to engage in dialogue with peers, participants and thought leaders around the globe. Being held in Orlando, Florida, May 14-16, 2012, this enhanced, real-time event connects attendees on site with global participants through state-of-the-art broadcast studios and an online experience that incorporates the latest social media and community functionality. Whether on site or online, participants can gain insight as to how SAP is delivering on its product strategy and helping organizations around the world to run better. For more information, visit www.sapphirenow.com. Follow SAPPHIRE NOW on Twitter at @SAPPHIRENOW and visit the Events Newsroom at www.events.news-sap.com.

Note to Editors:
Webcasts, announcements, media roundtables, keynote presentations and blog posts from SAPPHIRE NOW will be available in the Events Newsroom at: www.events.news-sap.com. To preview and download broadcast-standard stock footage and press photos digitally, please visit www.sap.com/photos. On this platform, you can find high-resolution material for your media channels. To view video stories on diverse topics, visit www.sap-tv.com. From this site, you can embed videos into your own Web pages, share video via email links and subscribe to RSS feeds from SAP TV. Follow SAP on Twitter at @sapnews.

For more information, press only:
Susan Miller, SAP, +1 (610) 661-9225, susan.miller@sap.com, EDT
SAP Press Office, +49 (6227) 7-46315, CET; +1 (610) 661-3200, EDT; press@sap.com
Jeff Shadid, Burson-Marsteller, +1 (214) 224-8419, jeff.shadid@bm.com, CDT

During SAPPHIRE NOW (from May 14 to 16), to speak with press contacts on site, please dial the SAP press room: +1 (610) 661-0469.

 

May 142012
 

Everything you want to know about SAP HANA is now available in an eBook, SAP HANA Essentials. The book provides business or technical backgrounds a broad overview of the architecture, tools, capabilities and use cases for SAP HANA. Additional chapters will be added on a regular basis.

You can get the book free via offer code: 0FED1038

Table of Contents

Chapter Title Timetable
1 SAP HANA Overview Available Now
2 SAP HANA Architecture Coming in Fall 2012
3 SAP HANA Business Cases & ROI Model Coming in Summer 2012
4 SAP HANA Applications Coming in Summer 2012
5 SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse on SAP Coming in Summer 2012
6 Data Provisioning with SAP HANA Coming in Fall 2012
7 Data Modeling with SAP HANA Coming in Fall 2012
8 Application Development with SAP HANA Coming in Fall 2012
9 SAP HANA Administration & Operations Coming in Fall 2012
10 SAP HANA Hardware Available Now
11 SAP HANA Projects & Implementation Available Now
12 SAP HANA Resources Coming in Summer 2012

 

About the Author: Jeffrey Word, Ph.D., is responsible for creating and communicating thought leadership on SAP’s In-Memory database strategy globally.  Over the last 13 years at SAP, he has driven multiple topics in technology strategy and corporate innovation projects.  He is also the co-author of the bestselling books, Integrated Business Processes with ERP Systems (2011) and SAP NetWeaver for Dummies (2004).  His next book, Integrated Business Processes with SAP® ERP, will be released in Fall 2012.