By Emily Jacobs
On day two of the SAP TechEd conference in Las Vegas, SAP unveiled a new partnership and announced updates to the SAP HANA platform.
SAP and SAS reveal new partnership
SAP and SAS will partner to create a joint technology and product roadmap designed to leverage the SAP HANA platform and SAS analytics capabilities.
By integrating the in-memory SAP HANA platform into SAS applications and allowing SAS’ analytics algorithms to run on the platform, decision makers will have access to real-time data analysis within their existing SAS and SAP HANA environments.
“Combining the power of SAP HANA platform with SAS advanced analytics applications is the first wave of innovation we plan to deliver to our joint customers,” said Bill McDermott, co-CEO and member of the Executive Board of SAP AG.
The partnership is intended to eliminate data movement, duplication and reconciliation whilst enabling parallelisation of computationally intense workloads.
“The partnership of SAS, the market-leading advanced analytics provider, with SAP will simplify big data and analytics efforts by reducing data movement and allowing for faster decision-making,” said Henry Morris, senior vice president, worldwide software and services, research, IDC.
“It can be more efficient to move the model to the data than the data to the model.”
Throughout 2014, the pilot program will see the building and prioritising of the two firms’ joint technology, for industries such as financial services, telecommunications, retail, consumer products and manufacturing.
New user-centric developments for SAP HANA
Three developments in the SAP HANA platform were unveiled at the SAP TechEd conference in Las Vegas.
A modified user experience with SAP Fiori apps, simplified cloud-based deployment options and new features in service pack 7 (SP7) for SAP HANA are all expected to address the needs of the real-time enterprise for customers, developers, startups and partners.
“It is incredible to see thousands of customers, startups, partners and developers, as well as more than a million students, touching SAP HANA every day,” said Dr Vishal Sikka, member of the Executive Board of SAP AG, Products and Innovation.
“With this latest release of SAP HANA, we enhance our users’ experience with beautiful design and simplify access to all the powerful new features of the platform. We are achieving the unprecedented ability to calculate in real time things that were previously unimaginable with SAP HANA on 10,000 CPU cores.”
The SAP Fiori services will see a team of professional designers working alongside customers to develop user-focused experiences across any app or solution.
The new SP7 for SAP HANA will allow developers to take advantage of core data services (CDS) and pre-packaged data quality libraries and includes the capability to create custom text analysis dictionaries for processing unstructed data.
It will also feature new high availability/disaster recovery deployment support, including snapshots and logs for replay.
Finally, SAP plans to introduce subscription-based options for the infrastructure of SAP HANA to allow simpler deployment. Scale, access and payment are intended to be simpler and based on the customer’s requirements.
