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 162012
 
ORLANDO — SAP continues to deliver on its innovation agenda and announced today a new wave of solutions built on the SAP HANA platform. These real-time solutions aim to help customers drive new business value with advanced reporting, analysis and planning capabilities in the context of their lines of business and industries. The announcement was made at SAPPHIRE NOW, being held in Orlando, Florida, May 14-16, 2012. “SAP’s innovation continues with the delivery of these new applications that are simple to use, easy to implement and are built on an open real-time platform,” said Dr. Vishal Sikka, member of the SAP Executive Board, Technology & Innovation. “These applications take advantage of detailed and fresh data, doing complex analysis on-the-fly to power interactive decision-making on mobile devices and in the cloud.” The solutions announced today are:
  • SAP Sales and Operations Planning application
  • SAP Cash Forecasting analytic application
  • SAP Planning and Consolidation application
  • SAP Collections Insight analytic application
  • SAP Sales Pipeline Analysis analytic content
  • SAP Bank Analyzer rapid-deployment solution for financial reporting with SAP HANA
  • SAP Deposits Management rapid-deployment solution for transaction history analysis with SAP HANA
  • SAP Supplier InfoNet site
Next Generation Planning Applications powered by SAP HANA SAP Sales and Operations Planning is a cloud-based application powered by SAP HANA and designed to help companies become more demand-driven by enabling them to rapidly translate demand fluctuations into actionable plans for manufacturing, procurement and logistics. With the new application, companies can engage stakeholders from sales, marketing, finance, supply chain and other functions in a truly integrated and collaborative planning process. SAP Sales and Operations Planning brings together the real-time computing power of SAP HANA and the social collaborative paradigm of the SAP Streamwork application to enable:
  • Planning, using a unified model of demand, supply chain and financial data, which can be analyzed in real time at any level of granularity or dimension
  • Rapid simulations and scenario comparison on a complete, detailed sales and operations planning model against multiple criteria such as demand fluctuations, product mix changes and capacity constraints
  • Collaboration, using an embedded, context-aware social platform to accelerate planning and decision-making across the company
More details on SAP Sales & Operations Planning, Powered by SAP HANA can be found in this video. “In relatively short period of time, we were able to model a significant portion of our business in the pilot environment and perform what-if scenario analysis,” said Richard Komm, director, Advanced Micro Devices. “We could adjust demand volumes and the capacity resource allocations and immediately see their impact on revenue and margins in the solution. This is something that used to take multiple spreadsheets, numerous emails and phone calls and meetings to develop an aligned plan. We feel that this solution has great potential to improve our sales and operations planning process management and accelerate decision-making and the overall responsiveness of our teams.” “Today, our sales and operations planning process is largely manual, managed over disconnected spreadsheets, spans multiple internal teams and contract manufacturers, and it takes too much time and effort to respond to demand and supply variations,” said James Smith, director, McKesson. “We were able to assess the impact of fluctuations in capacity positions at contract manufacturers on our sales forecasts in real time, model alternative scenarios and cut our planning cycle time in half. We are excited about the solution and look forward to rolling it out at McKesson.” SAP Cash Forecasting is an on-premise analytic application built on the SAP HANA platform that helps companies better navigate today’s volatile financial environment by providing advanced capabilities for cash forecasting and analysis in a heterogeneous system landscape. The application is available via an early adoption program. With SAP Cash Forecasting, companies can:
  • Create accurate cash forecasts based on financial data from SAP and non-SAP systems such as ERP
  • Develop an effective foreign exchange hedging strategy based on real-time visibility into exposure across multiple currencies
  • Perform ex-post variance analysis on cash forecasts with the ability to explain variance down to the cash flow statement item-level
  • Manage the forecast process centrally, tracking subsidiaries’ planning status and consolidating forecasts from across the company
“BSH Bosch und Siemens Hausgeräte GmbH co-innovated with SAP on the new SAP Cash Forecasting analytic application, which is built on the SAP HANA platform,” said Marco Dockweiler, enterprise architect, BSH Bosch und Siemens Hausgeräte GmbH. “This application has the potential to improve cash forecast accuracy and to optimize our processes in the treasury department. The results we have seen are very compelling, and we look forward to our continued collaboration with SAP.” SAP Planning and Consolidation helps organizations dramatically accelerate their planning processes, giving financial professionals more analytics power and smarter insights, as well as time savings. Powered by SAP HANA, the application enables companies to accelerate budgeting and forecasting by speeding up the retrieval of queries, pull in large data sets and get a real-time view of what’s happening in the business. As a result, people can plan faster, input data back into systems faster and shrink planning cycles, enabling organizations to more quickly respond to capitalize on opportunities or avoid risks. This also provides simplicity for IT as the application is optimized in real-time with SAP HANA.  Empowering Sales and Marketing Users With Real-Time Solutions SAP Collections Insight provides sales teams with the real-time customer insights they need to optimize their collections strategy and the collaborative tools to execute that strategy. The application is available via an early adoption program. Powered by SAP HANA and accessible via an easy-to-use Web or mobile app, SAP Collections Insight helps companies:
  • Develop rich, dynamic profiles of their customers, including real-time visibility and analysis of payment history and trends
  • Equip users to quickly make and act on collection calls — anytime, anywhere
  • Empower users to collaborate rapidly and effectively to track and resolve collections issues
The capabilities delivered by SAP Collections Insight can enable companies to increase collections yield, accelerate the conversion of revenue to cash and strengthen their customer relationships. SAP Sales Pipeline Analysis, powered by SAP HANA, helps sales organizations to get instant insights into massive volumes of pipeline data in the SAP Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM) application while performing on-the-fly calculations and in-depth analysis on any business dimension. Sales managers can react more quickly to changing sales conditions with real-time information and accelerate deals through the pipeline with powerful and user-driven analytics. As a result, companies can unlock hidden revenue opportunities as well as significantly increase profits and sales effectiveness. To help ensure a quicker time-to-value for customers, the content can be deployed as a rapid-deployment solution with the SAP rapid-deployment solution for sales pipeline analysis with SAP HANA. Taking Advantage of “Big Data” in the Banking Industry SAP Bank Analyzer rapid-deployment solution for financial reporting with SAP HANA is designed to help organizations quickly analyze large volumes of data, enabling them to automate lean banking processes and make decisions in near real time. The solution enables banking organizations to rapidly generate detailed financial reports on assets and accounting performance, offering immediate answers to their business questions. SAP Deposits Management rapid-deployment solution for transaction history analysis with SAP HANA helps retail banks boost performance through improved transaction history analysis. It makes it easy for employees to access up-to-date account information, while powerful in-memory data platform and business intelligence (BI) software helps organizations process multi-year information for real-time insights. Drive Greater Visibility and Stronger Performance Across the Business Network SAP Supplier InfoNet is an information network that brings together the power of SAP HANA and the cloud to help companies gain real-time insights from ‘big data” and rapidly respond to changing conditions across their multi-tier supply networks. With this solution, companies are able to effectively manage their complex supply chains by:
  • Proactively monitoring and predicting risks across the multi-tier supply network with real-time alerts and leading-edge machine learning and statistical analysis tools
  • Gaining instant insights into the operational health of the supply network by aggregating and analyzing supplier data from enterprise systems and thousands of external data sources
  • Benchmarking supplier performance on quality and delivery and identifying significant shifts and trends in their performance
The capabilities delivered by SAP Supplier InfoNet empower companies to minimize supply chain disruptions before they impact the business, drive stronger performance of their suppliers and save time and operational costs of managing the supplier base. 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 Cathrin Wolf, +49 6227 7 63908, cathrin.wolf@sap.com, CET SAP Press Office, +49 (6227) 7-46315, CET; +1 (610) 661-3200, EDT; press@sap.com 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 — A company’s ability to grow with its data is critical. Increasingly, organizations are challenged to draw deeper insights from larger data sets in shrinking windows of time. To empower customers in this regard, SAP offers scale-out capabilities with the SAP HANA platform so that customers can grow their deployments to multiple nodes, supporting multi-terabyte data sets to provide real-time insights on big data. More than 50 percent of the original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) that offer x86 servers now deliver servers certified to run SAP HANA in a scale-out environment, including leading SAP technology partners Fujitsu, HP and IBM. In addition, SAP and Intel have collaborated to optimize SAP HANA to run optimally on Intel processors, enabling greater business agility and innovative usage models that let customers respond to changing conditions in real time. The announcement was made at SAPPHIRE NOW, being held in Orlando, Florida, May 14-16, 2012. “Our ongoing, joint engineering collaboration allowed SAP HANA to take full advantage of the powerful performance, reliability and availability features of the Intel Xeon processor E7 family,” said Diane Bryant, vice president and general manager of Intel’s Datacenter and Connected Systems Group. “The optimization of SAP HANA for Intel processors allows customers to achieve much more efficient results, increasing their record-breaking performance and scalability for mission-critical applications for increased business value.” SAP HANA delivers scale-up and scale-out solutions for clients to run big data, growth-oriented applications and analytics — including high-volume instances of the SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse application — by rapidly scaling to many nodes in high-performance and high-availability configurations. Other key benefits include:
  • Ability to handle large volumes of data: In addition to compression of data that fundamentally reduces the amount of memory required, SAP HANA grows with the number of data volumes across multiple nodes. SAP has validated 16 nodes and has not seen limitations on a large number of nodes now certified on demand for partners and customers.
  • Better failover and high availability: High availability enables the failover of a node within a distributed SAP HANA database. With cluster configurations, failover uses a cold standby node and gets triggered automatically. If a node fails, the database on a standby server can be cold-started and returns to its last consistent state by replaying the log since the last save point from shared storage. Distributed processing of data allows systems to scale beyond one server and can remove the single point of failure.
  • End-to-end improvement in performance: Increasing nodes of SAP HANA clusters enables distribution of data loading and analysis utilizing massively parallel processing (MPP) capabilities.
“With the scale out of SAP HANA, we see almost linear improvement in performance with additional computing nodes,” said Dr. Vishal Sikka, member of the SAP Executive Board, Technology & Innovation. “Recently, in our research labs, we have assembled the largest SAP HANA system that scales to 100 nodes, 4000 computing cores and 100 TB in DRAM. Now CIOs can adopt in-memory databases for large deployments with peace of mind that it can grow with their data and provide breakthrough improvement in end-to-end performance.” The business value of SAP HANA was demonstrated recently through scalability testing performed by SAP on SAP HANA with a 16-node server cluster. During the testing, SAP HANA allowed SAP NetWeaver BW-like queries to be executed on 100 billion rows of sales and distribution data with sub-second performance results, without any indexing or tuning required. The results of this testing highlights the ability of SAP HANA to enable customers to perform real-time analytics directly on raw transactional data without going through traditional extract, transform and load (ETL) processes and building of aggregates or materialized views. Details on the testing can be found in a recently released SAP HANA performance white paper. For additional information regarding SAP HANA and in-memory computing technology, visit the Experience SAP HANA website. 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. To be 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. Media Contacts: Samantha Finnegan, +1 (650) 276-9350, samantha.finnegan@sap.com, PDT Cindy McKendry, +1 (503) 231-7274, cindy.mckendry@sap.com, PDT 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 152012
 

ORLANDO — The McLaren Group, known for its Grand Prix racing team and iconic Formula 1 cars, will integrate its growing portfolio of businesses using solutions from SAP as its technology backbone. McLaren selected SAP for enterprise applications that improve efficiency across all lines of business, combined with an innovative vision that promises to amplify that value via mobile devices, the cloud and in-memory technology. The announcement was made at SAPPHIRE NOW, being held in Orlando, Florida, May 14-16, 2012

SAP has a long-standing relationship with various parts of the McLaren Group. This latest deal marks a new stage in their relationship aimed at transforming the IT infrastructure of the entire McLaren Group. McLaren is a midsize company, quickly growing across multiple business centers and regions. As the company expands its investment into diverse markets, including applied technology, electronic systems and high-end hospitality, it needed a technology engine that was integrated, scalable and delivered maximum performance.

McLaren chose SAP to help create a holistic approach, enabling the company to gain better visibility and leverage best practices more easily across the business divisions. With the SAP HANA platform and mobile apps, the company will be able to empower everyone — from tire changers to executives — with the real-time information needed to keep ahead of competitors. The McLaren Group is looking forward to a fast time-to-value using SAP Rapid Deployment solutions, pre-configured software and implementation services.

“The McLaren Group is a rapidly growing business and has unique demands for our software implementation,” said Ron Dennis, executive chairman, The McLaren Group. “These are exciting times for our business, and as we look to the future, we’re pleased to be able to partner with a company like SAP that shares our values – passion, commitment and the willingness to make sacrifices in order to be the absolute best. The growth and longevity of our brand are dependent on our having a varied portfolio, supported by a strong business plan, implemented by the best people – with input from the best partners.”

The McLaren Group’s core activity is Formula 1 racing, a data-intensive sport that demands technical agility and continuous, rapid invention. And McLaren has perfected telemetry systems, which use data generated by race car sensors, so much so that it is the official electronics system for all Formula 1 teams as well IndyCar and NASCAR series. SAP HANA will help turbo-charge both the speed and depth of McLaren’s telemetry technology allowing the teams to look at much larger data sets and ask more complex questions. This real-time analysis of car sensor data can be run against both historical data and predictive models, helping the team to make immediate proactive corrections, avoid costly, dangerous incidents and win the race. With instant analysis of what is happening to the car while the race is on, the driver and engineers can work together to ensure a winning result.

“At McLaren we’re accustomed to handling ‘big data,’” continued Dennis. “On every lap of every Grand Prix, practice or test session, our Formula 1 cars generate vast quantities of performance data. Our ability to process that data and act on it rapidly is crucial to creating the kind of prescriptive intelligence that enables us to transform the outcome of races. And that need resonates through every other facet of our business.”

As McLaren diversifies its business, its electronic systems — including telemetry, modeling and real-time simulations — are being used widely in other areas, such as to help Olympic athletes hone their performance and in rapid transit systems in the U.S. to optimize traffic flow. The company plans to use SAP innovations to augment the competitive advantage it provides across these various areas.

“Transforming information into intelligence in real time is a cornerstone for McLaren’s winning formula – and increasingly critical for the future of every company,” said Jim Hagemann Snabe, co-CEO, SAP AG.” With SAP HANA, mobile and the complete SAP portfolio underpinning its business, McLaren can now bring increased intelligence across the full spectrum of its business operations. SAP will be able to help McLaren better anticipate, accelerate and differentiate its business — keeping them very much in the driver’s seat. In short, working together, SAP will help McLaren run like never before.”

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:
Robin Meyerhoff, +1 (650) 440-2572, robin.meyerhoff@sap.com, PDT
SAP Press Office, +49 (6227) 7-46315, CET; +1 (610) 661-3200, EDT; press@sap.com

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.

May 142012
 

If you wanted to learn who is using SAP HANA read a blog from Simo Said from SAP. Simo captures how well-known companies are using SAP HANA, such as Kraft, John Deere, Amerisource.

Kraft, John Deere and other customers are presenting at SAPPHIRE NOW this week.  Go to the SAPPHIRE NOW Virtual Platform to watch keynotes and presentations.  Below are the links to Kraft & John Deere presentations:

May 012012
 

Steve Lucas, head of SAP database & technology at SAP wrote a blog negating claims about SAP HANA.

He goes deep into the following areas:

  • SAP HANA features and functionalities
  • SAP HANA customer use cases
  • Pricing for SAP HANA

Read Steve’s blog, “What Oracle Won’t Tell You about SAP HANA“.

Apr 302012
 

WALLDORF — Changing the face of social software by making collaboration more pervasive in organizations and business applications and processes, SAP today announced the availability of new analytics capabilities in the collaborative decision-making application SAP StreamWork. Users can upload, explore, analyze and visualize data directly within SAP StreamWork, and collaborate with teams to make fact-based decisions. People can also connect to data stored in SAP HANA to take advantage of in-memory capabilities for rapid analysis of information.

All SAP StreamWork users can benefit from accessible, easy-to-use analytics – there is no training or prior experience required. For example, people can begin by simply uploading spreadsheets to SAP StreamWork activities via their Web browsers and using the exploration tool to quickly filter, sort and work with data. They can then create and save interactive visualizations from many offered chart types; monitor key metrics by setting visual alerts; and add social features such as pro-con tables, rankings, quick polls and checklists. Additionally, enhanced support for SAP Crystal Reports software means users can now embed, view and save interactive report data within SAP StreamWork activities, without having to download files or switch between applications.

“Collaborative work is about getting the right people, data, content and systems together at the right time, in the work context,” said industry analyst Michael Fauscette, GVP, Software Business Solutions Group, IDC. “Bringing business-contextual data together with social capabilities for hypothesizing, analyzing and making decisions enables people to get work done, which increases the relevance and business value of the system significantly.”

“Collaborative analytic capabilities are critical to how we execute our vision for what social software should be for SAP customers,” said Sameer Patel, global vice president and general manager, Social Software Solutions, SAP. “Our belief is that true collaboration to drive action goes beyond just connecting people well – it requires access to and manipulation of critical data and exception handling in business processes. As social networks become more pervasive, collaborative analytic capabilities enable our customers to bring process, data and content to where employees, customers and partners work. Business users can now easily interact with a variety of critical data, such as sales pipeline analysis, sales and operations planning, or supplier assessment and management.

For more information, visit the SAP StreamWork blog and the SAP Newsroom. Follow SAP on Twitter at @sapnews and @sapstreamwork.

Media Contact:
Susan Miller, SAP, +1 (610) 661-9225, susan.miller@sap.com, EDT
Jeff Shadid, Burson-Marsteller, +1 (214) 224-8419, jeff.shadid@bm.com, CDT

Apr 102012
 

SAN FRANCISCO — SAP today announced its innovation road map to help transform the database and mobile markets. At a press conference held this morning in San Francisco, Dr. Vishal Sikka, member of the SAP Executive Board, Technology & Innovation, highlighted the full integration of Sybase and unveiled the company’s vision for the SAP real-time data platform, comprising the SAP HANA platform, Sybase data management offerings and SAP solutions for enterprise information management (EIM). SAP also announced its most recent innovations for the real-time data platform, including:

  • General availability of the SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse (SAP NetWeaver BW) component powered by SAP HANA
  • General availability of SAP Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) as a database option for SAP Business Suite applications
  • Plans to launch a US$155 million venture fund for startups to build on the new platform and a US$337 million incentive program for customers to move to SAP HANA

“SAP is redefining the database market by combining the innovation and expertise of SAP and Sybase,” said Dr. Hasso Plattner, chairman of the SAP Supervisory Board. “At its core is the innovative and now proven in-memory database SAP HANA, which helps customers access and deliver information at unprecedented speeds up to 100,000 times faster than before and enables them to envision fundamentally new ways of running their businesses. Customers can run existing systems more efficiently while easily embracing new technologies.”

To extend its vision to provide customers one logical, real-time platform for all transaction and analytics workloads, SAP will leverage the industry-leading Sybase data management and movement products. With the evolutionary and non-disruptive integration of SAP and Sybase products, customers will have unprecedented capabilities to transact, move, store, process and analyze data in real time while reducing costs with common design and landscape management capabilities. The SAP real-time data platform will simplify layers of complexity and deliver unmatched capabilities in next-generation “big data” applications and analytics and enhanced support for cloud and mobile applications — all with minimal customer disruption.

SAP today provided the following road map details and areas of strategic innovation and investment of its database portfolio to increase its database market leadership by 2015:

  • SAP HANA platform: This state-of-the-art in-memory platform is planned to be the core of the SAP real-time data platform, offering extreme performance and innovation for next-generation applications.
  • SAP Sybase ASE: SAP Sybase ASE is intended as a supported option for SAP Business Suite applications while SAP HANA is planned to augment the extreme transactions of SAP Sybase ASE with real-time reporting capabilities.
  • SAP Sybase IQ server: SAP Sybase IQ is planned to deliver data management for “big data” analytics, offering extreme total cost of ownership (TCO). SAP Sybase IQ is envisioned to share common capabilities and life-cycle management with the SAP HANA platform.
  • SAP Sybase SQL Anywhere: This market-leading mobile and embedded database with millions of deployments is planned to be the front-end database for the SAP HANA platform, extending its reach to mobile and embedded applications in real time.
  • SAP Sybase PowerDesigner software: This flagship data modeling, information architecture and orchestration software is envisioned to become the foundation of the modeling solution for the SAP real-time data platform, offering a large base of experts to customers. Ford Motor Company recently selected the software to drive its data modeling and management and centralize all logical and physical modeling functions.
  • SAP Sybase Event Stream Processor (ESP) software, SAP Sybase Replication Server and SAP solutions for EIM: Combined, these offerings are intended to provide data assessment and integration of batch, real-time change data capture and streaming data into the SAP real-time data platform.
  • SAP real-time data platform integrated with Hadoop: SAP HANA and SAP Sybase IQ are planned to extend support for accessing “big data” sources such as Hadoop, and offer a deeply integrated pre-processing infrastructure.

SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse Powered by SAP HANA is Generally Available
SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse powered by SAP HANA entered ramp-up on November 7, 2011, and in five months achieved the milestones necessary to become generally available. Ramp-up customers reported significant gains in query performance, massive reduction in load times and compression of data size, significantly reducing amount of data to store and backup. This is a first step in enabling the SAP real-time data platform for both data warehousing and analytic use cases.

“Real-time insight that combines our customer demand and marketing promotion with supply chain visibility on a rock-solid enterprise-class data platform is a must in our industry,” said Weijun Zhang, deputy director, Shanghai Volkswagen. “With SAP HANA, we see a tremendous opportunity to dramatically improve our enterprise data warehouse solutions with SAP NetWeaver BW powered by SAP HANA, drastically reducing data latency and improving speed when we can return query results in 45 seconds versus waiting up to 20 minutes for empty results from SAP NetWeaver BW running on a traditional disk-based database platform.”

“The go-live of SAP NetWeaver BW on SAP HANA is a significant milestone at Lenovo,” said Xiaoyu Liu, vice president, GM Global Application Development, Lenovo Beijing. “We have much faster and greater capabilities for advanced operational and analytics reporting, which will improve our end-to-end business efficiency, productivity and agility to enable us to react to changing market situation quickly. With the rapid SAP HANA implementation, it proves that we are able to turn the product into a solution reality at Lenovo without any business disruption. We will continue our journey of leveraging SAP HANA to enable and empower our business to become No. 1.”

SAP Business Suite on SAP Sybase ASE Generally Available in April
With SAP Business Suite on SAP Sybase ASE, SAP plans to offer optimal integration with a commitment to provide new and existing customers with end-to-end application and database solutions, along with integrated maintenance and synchronized releases. As an integral part of the SAP real-time data platform, SAP Sybase ASE brings to SAP applications a proven database management system that has been in use for more than 25 years in highly demanding, mission-critical transactional environments across industries. With more than 30,000 customers, SAP Sybase ASE has a loyal and committed customer base with a 97 percent customer satisfaction rating thanks to its high performance, reliability, world-class technical support and low cost of ownership. Customers in production today with SAP Business Suite on SAP Sybase ASE are already seeing these benefits.

“Our SAP ERP migration to SAP Sybase ASE was driven by the need to lower overall costs and improve operational agility while at the same time delivering systems in a highly available and high-performance environment,” said Juan Stagg, CIO, El Machetazo. “The ability to work with one company to achieve these goals has proven to be a winning solution for El Machetazo. One of the surprising benefits of our SAP ERP migration was how quickly and smoothly we were able to migrate SAP Sybase ASE — it took half the time we anticipated and I measure it in hours rather than days or weeks.”

US$155 Million Venture Fund for Startups, US$337 Million Database Migration Adoption Program
To bolster innovation in the startup community, SAP is creating a new fund of US$155 million, managed by SAP Ventures. To be named the “SAP HANA Real-Time Fund,” it will be used to foster and support an ecosystem of entrepreneurs and investors focused on the development of real-time applications. This announcement comes on the heels of the first SAP Startup Forum, which was held in Palo Alto in March and featured 24 startups leveraging the SAP HANA platform.

In addition, SAP is delivering on its promise of game-changing innovation. The company is prioritizing its investments based on customer input and today launched the US$337 million “SAP HANA Adoption Program,” dedicated to customer adoption of SAP HANA and the SAP real-time data platform. For any new customers transitioning from legacy databases, SAP will invest in SAP Consulting services for customers to adopt and implement SAP HANA. Separately, SAP is announcing a commitment to SAP HANA customers that have completed implementation to allow up to an 18-month exchange program out of their SAP HANA licenses to any other previously licensed SAP product if they are not satisfied.

“SAP’s vision is focused on enabling a paradigm shift in data management: transforming enterprise IT departments from complex and slow landscapes—struggling to deliver on organizational objectives—to a simplified architecture that enables new classes of ‘big data,’ cloud and mobile applications in addition to renewing existing applications non-disruptively,” said Sikka. “Recent advances in process, memory and networking technologies have made this vision a reality.”

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