SAP AG has announced next steps in delivering SAP HANA as the modern platform that empowers customers to transform their businesses and innovate in the cloud. This includes new innovations, key features and functionalities for SAP HANA, mobile, analytics, data services and cloud integration services delivered through beautiful and open user interfaces.
SAP also unveiled winners of the SAP HANA Innovation Award, celebrating customers that have positively impacted business and society with the platform. The announcement was made at SAPPHIRE NOW, being held 3 to 5 June, 2014, in Orlando, Florida.
“Today’s announcements show that SAP HANA is the modern platform for all applications, enabling customers to truly innovate and transform their businesses in the cloud,” says Steve Lucas, president, Platform Solutions, SAP AG.
“With continued innovations in SAP HANA, mobile and big data combined with dramatically simpler migration to the cloud, SAP provides enhanced integration for our customers, allowing customers to focus on what is important — innovating to win.”
The new release of service pack 8 (SP8) for SAP HANA provides next steps for customers to accelerate, innovate and simplify their business.
Customers can accelerate deployment of SAP HANA by taking advantage of the wide ecosystem of partners, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Intel E7v2 processor-based systems, multiple third-party high availability and disaster recovery solutions and an expanded network of 20 partners certified to support solutions powered by SAP HANA in the cloud.
SAP HANA SP8 empowers customers to innovate next-generation SAP and custom applications. The business intelligence and data visualisation software SAP Lumira can be deployed to run on top of the SAP HANA platform, providing real-time analytic capabilities.
With an expanded integration framework which is to come, partners such as SAS are envisioned to become enabled to embed advanced analytic functions, like predictive model scoring inside SAP HANA, adding massive performance gains while removing the complexity of redundant data movement.
Preliminary results at Southern California Edison with SAS scoring functions running natively on the in-memory SAP HANA platform show a significant 300% uptick in performance when executing a demand response model.
SAP aims to simplify the management of SAP HANA through native high availability and disaster recovery capabilities, such as synchronous replication and support for multiple hot standbys to enable near-zero downtime for upgrades and maintenance.
Overall, customers are envisioned to benefit from better performance and new innovations while leveraging current infrastructure investments, resulting in a lower total cost of ownership for their entire IT landscape.
To celebrate customer innovation achievements and the use of SAP HANA to transform businesses and ultimately impact people’s lives, SAP unveiled the winners of the inaugural SAP HANA Innovation Award at SAPPHIRE NOW.
End users who have successfully deployed SAP HANA for production use in the last 12 months entered their use cases in award categories such as “Trailblaser,” “Social Hero” and “big data.”
Nearly 30 entries were submitted and more than 6,000 votes were cast in combination with 11 judges from the community and SAP deciding the winners. The three winners in the respective categories are Spirit AeroSystems, NCT and CenterPoint Energy.
With new standardised and packaged turnkey solutions for the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud service, customers can more easily migrate to SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud and transform their businesses in highly secure environments.
The solutions include a comprehensive set of pre-packaged rapid-deployment solutions that aim to automate deployment and simplify customers’ journey to the cloud. Three new turnkey solutions for retail, insurance and supplier network collaboration and Ariba network integration have been added to the existing set of five simple-to-consume and easy-to-operate solutions.
Customers benefit from accelerated delivery and simplified operations within a managed private cloud environment and can get started with a trial of turnkey solutions for SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud.
Customers can now use SAP HANA Cloud Integration technology as a stand-alone solution for all integration requirements across their application landscape. Customers integrate data and processes between cloud and on-premise applications, including SAP and third-party applications. SAP also continues to extend and enhance pre-packaged integration content that allows customers to quickly realise new business scenarios.
The latest releases of SAP Data Services and SAP Information Steward software provide capabilities to enable business users as well as IT to derive immediate value from their big data projects. New and enhanced features include Apache Hadoop 2.0 support, extended integration with SAP HANA and intuitive interactive dashboards for job monitoring, and making it easier to define validation rules and views in SAP Information Steward.
SAP Consumer Insight 365 is envisioned to be the new cloud offering powered by the SAP HANA platform and aims to securely unlock the empirical value of mobile operator network data to provide customers with rich and actionable consumer insights and market intelligence.
With this new offering, SAP aims to enable enterprises and brands to have more targeted and meaningful engagement with consumers. Iusacell, the third-largest wireless telecommunications company in Mexico, is planned to be the first operator to partner with SAP for this service. SAP understands that security and privacy is a critical part of SAP Consumer Insight 365.
The 2.0 version of SAP Mobile Secure is a next-generation enterprise mobility management solution portfolio that aims to offer customers a unified solution to manage, secure and publish mobile apps to their employees, business partners and consumers.
The software as a service (SaaS) offering from the portfolio is planned to be deployed in SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, using SAP HANA as the analytics engine and planned to be available via subscription. Announced recently is National Grid’s use of the latest version of SAP Mobile Platform, which offers the full unification of the company’s proven mobile app development platform frameworks using SAP HANA Cloud Platform.
