SAP unveils Cloud Platform Services and In-Memory

“Our mission at SAP is to empower businesses to lead the digital transformation in their industry,” said Quentin Clark, chief technology officer and member of the Global Managing Board of SAP SE. “In order to succeed in this digital transformation, companies need a platform that enables real-time business, delivers business agility, is able to scale and provides contextual awareness in a hyper-connected world. With the introduction of SAP HANA Vora and the planned new capabilities in SAP HANA Cloud Platform, we aim to enable our customers to become leaders in the digital economy.”

Creating Contextual Awareness with SAP HANA Vora
SAP HANA Vora is a new in-memory query engine that leverages and extends the Apache Spark execution framework to provide enriched interactive analytics on Hadoop. As companies take part in their digital transformation journey, they face complex hurdles in dealing with distributed Big Data everywhere, compounded by the lack of business process awareness across enterprise apps, analytics, Big Data and Internet of Things (IoT) sources.

SAP HANA Vora helps to extend in-memory computing innovation from SAP to distributed data and provides OLAP-like analytics with a business semantic understanding of data in and around the Hadoop ecosystem. Companies can enhance their decision-making with full understanding of their business activities in context with SAP HANA Vora. Data access also can become democratized for data scientists and developers, making it easier to mashup corporate and Hadoop data together to discover answers to unknown questions.

SAP HANA Vora is planned to help benefit customers in various industries where highly interactive Big Data analytics in business process context is paramount, such as financial services, telecommunications, healthcare and manufacturing. Use case examples where SAP HANA Vora can potentially benefit customers include:
· Mitigate risk and fraud by detecting new anomalies in financial transactions and customer history data
· Optimize telecommunication bandwidth by analyzing traffic patterns to help avoid network bottlenecks and improve network quality of service (QoS).
· Deliver preventive maintenance and improve product re-call process by analyzing bill-of-material, services records and sensor data together

“As part of our Big Data initiative, we currently have Hadoop and SAP HANA deployed in our enterprise IT landscape to help manage large unstructured data sets,” said Aziz Safa, VP and GM, Intel IT Enterprise Applications and Application Strategy. “One of the key requirements for us is to have better analyses of Big Data, but mining these large data sets for contextual information in Hadoop is a challenge. SAP HANA Vora will provide us with the capability to conduct OLAP processing directly on these large, rich data sets all in-memory and stored in Hadoop. This will allow us to extract contextual information and then push those valuable insights back to our business.”

SAP HANA Vora is planned to be released to customers in late September; a cloud-based developer edition is planned to be available at the same time.

Simplifying Open, Agile Business Application Development with SAP HANA Cloud Platform
SAP HANA Cloud Platform enables rapid application development and extensibility for Software as a Service (SaaS) as well as on-premise applications. SAP also plans to expand SAP HANA Cloud Platform’s ability to power digital transformation, collaboration and application development while improving time to value with more pre-delivered business apps. Highlights include:
· Enhanced digital connectivity: Companies can go from sensor to action with SAP HANA Cloud Platform for the IoT, generally available starting in late September. With the services, customers and partners can add device management, device data connectivity and bi-directional device data synchronization capabilities. Additionally, SAP® API Management technology powers and manages secure, enterprise-grade API connections to any SAP or non-SAP application. Leveraging both with SAP HANA Cloud Platform, customers can connect edge devices to business action, build extended business networks and share digital assets.
· Enhanced collaboration: New work patterns for the SAP Jam™ social software platform, available now, enable developers to build better, more collaborative apps quickly and easily with in-context information to get work done. Additionally, the new cloud trial of SAP HANA Cloud Platform gamification services aims to allow developers to quickly incorporate game concepts into new and existing applications with a workbench, software development kits (SDKs) and widgets.
· Enhanced mobile security: With the addition of SAP Mobile Secure solutions and mobile app protection, enterprises can now deploy a more secure mobile environment. These capabilities help enterprises simplify the security and management of mobile devices and applications, including application management and remote locking, as well as wiping of managed devices. Additionally, customers can easily build, configure and distribute mobile apps to end-users in a streamlined workflow.
· Pre-delivered applications: With the new cloud trial of the SAP Fiori® user experience (UX), cloud edition, it is planned that users can leverage a set of SAP Fiori apps to connect with their own systems to try the new SAP Fiori UX or extend an existing SAP Fiori app or create a new SAP Fiori-like app.
· Business services: SAP is providing cloud trial access to business services, which aims to encapsulate best-practice business functions and expose these functions as APIs. These business services are intended to be quickly combined to create powerful, personalized cloud and mobile apps using SAP HANA Cloud Platform.
§ SAP hybris® as a Service on SAP HANA Cloud Platform (public beta) plans to offer a wide range of diverse business developer services, starting with a new set of services that augment and enhance the SAP hybris front office, which aims to include products such as the SAP hybris Commerce and SAP hybris Marketing solutions and others. SAP hybris as a Service on SAP HANA Cloud Platform is planned to be open to developers, solution providers, independent software vendors (ISVs) and IT organizations for building their own business services and then offering them to customers or other developers.
§ SAP tax calculation service (limited trial) intends to provide a tax determination and computation services as an API. This service also plans to offer global tax compliance by covering the legal aspects of tax computation for over 75 countries. Read more here.

“As the provider of choice for real-time communications solutions for many of the world’s largest companies, GENBAND has achieved rapid growth organically and through acquisition as well as through aggressive sales and marketing, so ensuring the ease of interaction with our customers is a major priority,” said Darrin Whitney, CIO, GENBAND. “To continually improve customer experience and our own internal productivity processes, GENBAND chose SAP HANA Cloud Platform to help personalize our customer and partner experience. With SAP HANA Cloud Platform we improved service desk operations to meet and exceed service level agreements, reduced licensing fees and operational costs. SAP HANA Cloud Platform has definitely met our expectations.”

SAP has an established partner ecosystem that is ready to resell and provide services for customers as they transform their businesses in today’s digital economy with new capabilities planned for SAP HANA Cloud Platform and SAP HANA Vora. Read what SAP partners, including Arvato Systems, Bluefin Solutions Inc, Capgemini, Cisco, Cloudera, CSC, Deloitte Consulting LLP, Hortonworks, In Mind, MapR Technologies and Sprinklr have to say: “Partner Quotes: SAP Accelerates Digital Transformation of Business with New Cloud Platform Services and In-Memory Innovation on Hadoop.”