By Anne Widjaja
At a press conference in San Francisco today, SAP AG announced its innovation road map and revealed a new take on SAP’s database and mobile offerings – including unveiling what’s in store for Sybase products and SAP HANA by 2015.
Among the announcements were plans to launch a US$155 million venture fund for start-ups to build on the new real-time platform, as well as a US$337 million ‘SAP HANA Adoption Program’ to drive customer adoption of the platform.
The start-up fund will be named the ‘SAP HANA Real-Time Fund’, and will be used to foster and support ecosystems of entrepreneurs and investors focused on the development of real-time applications. For customers, SAP will invest in SAP consulting services for customers transitioning from legacy databases, looking to adopt and implement SAP HANA.
The company also announced a commitment to SAP HANA customers that have completed implementation to allow for up to an 18-month exchange program of their SAP HANA licenses to any other previously licensed SAP product.
These were just some of the plans announced by Dr Vishal Sikka, member of the SAP Executive Board, Technology and Innovation, outlining the company’s roadmap to 2015. Sikka highlighted plans for the full integration of Sybase and for SAP’s real-time data platform, which included the company’s vision for SAP HANA as the core of the platform.
SAP plans to leverage Sybase data management and movement products to provide customers one real-time platform for all transaction and analytics workloads.
According to SAP, the integration of products such as SAP HANA and Sybase products will mean that customers will have the capability to transact, move, store, process and analyse data in real time. The SAP real-time data platform will aim to simplify layers of complexity and reduce costs with common design and landscape management capabilities, and will also deliver new “big data” applications and analytics, with enhanced support for cloud and mobile applications.
On the integration of Sybase and the future for SAP HANA, Dr Hasso Plattner, chairman of the SAP Supervisory Board, said, “SAP is redefining the database market by combining the innovation and expertise of SAP and Sybase.
“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.”
The roadmap also outlined plans for Sybase data management offerings and SAP solutions for enterprise information management (EIM). SAP introduced its most recent innovations for the real-time data platform, which included the release of SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse and SAP Sybase Adaptive Service Enterprise (ASE) as a database option for SAP Business Suite applications.
The SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse Powered by SAP HANA ramp-up has achieved significant wins since its release in November 2011. Customers such as Shanghai Volkswagen and Lenovo Beijing have reported improvements in query performance, massive reduction in load times and compression of data size.
The SAP Business Suite on Sybase ASE will be available in April, and aims to provide new and existing customers with end-to-end application and database solutions, with additional integrated maintenance and synchronised releases.
On the goals of the innovation roadmap, Sikka said, “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 organisational objectives – to a simplified architecture that enables new classes of ‘big data,’ cloud and mobile applications in addition to renewing existing applications non-disruptively. Recent advances in process, memory and networking technologies have made this vision a reality.”
SAP provided the following roadmap details and areas of strategic innovation and investment of its database portfolio, which aims to increase its database market leadership by 2015:
• SAP HANA platform: The 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 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 modelling, information architecture and orchestration software is envisioned to become the foundation of the modelling 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 modelling and management and centralise all logical and physical modelling 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.
