By Freya Purnell
SAP has announced it will be moving Ariba to the HANA platform, to enable participants in the business-to-business trading community to gain new insights and act on them more quickly.
The initial step, transitioning Ariba Spend Visibility, was completed with zero down time, with users now processing key operational and analytical reports up to 100 times faster. The next step is to shift the Ariba Network to the platform.
The Ariba Network on SAP HANA will create an entirely new cloud offering, enable companies to glean predictive intelligence on risks, performance, capabilities, rates and more from the 15 years of transaction and relationship data and community-generated content in the network. The new capabilities can be added on an opt-in basis.
“We always knew the true potential of the SAP HANA platform would be realised by the applications that run on top,” said Bill McDermott, co-CEO and member of the Executive Board of SAP AG. “With Ariba solutions on SAP HANA, companies will gain unprecedented real-time insights and transparency into their business networks.”
As SAP moves the Ariba Network to SAP HANA, companies will be able to analyse structured data on production, marketing, sales and pricing, HR, finance, facilities and operations, as well as transaction-level data from supplier, customer and partner relationships, and unstructured data such as blogs and tweets. With HANA, data loads 30 times faster and is instantly accessible.
According to SAP, once a sourcing project, contract or invoice is initiated on the network, companies can immediately perform more complex analyses based on an expanded set of variables, including cost centers, purchase price variances and micro regions, and receive results in real time. The platform will also leverage SAP Lumira to enable Ariba customers to visualise and interact with their data.
