Customers in industries requiring highly interactive big data analytics are the target of SAP’s newest release, SAP HANA Vora – an in-memory query engine working on the Apache Spark framework to provide enriched interactive analytics on Hadoop.
According to SAP, Vora will extend the in-memory capabilities from within SAP to distributed data sets in and around the Hadoop ecosystem, enabling companies to gain a full understanding of their business activities in context.
Data scientists and developers will also gain easier access to data, enabling mash-ups of corporate and Hadoop big data sets to explore different types of business questions and scenarios.
On the introduction of Vora, Anil Gadre, senior vice president, product management, MapR Technologies, said Hadoop and Spark are emerging as key platforms for enterprises seeking a 360-degree view of customers.
“The challenges for these enterprises come when trying to democratize their 360-degree data across all consumers and stakeholders while also storing the data for analytics over many years or even decades. SAP HANA Vora on MapR will help empower enterprises to further expand their customer 360-degree view on Hadoop, Spark, SAP HANA and other data sources,” Gadre said.
Intel currently has Hadoop and SAP HANA deployed in its enterprise environment to manage large unstructured data sets, according to 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,” Safa said. “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.”
Vora is expected to be particularly attractive to customers in financial services, telecommunications, healthcare and manufacturing, where business process context is essential for analytics. Potential use cases include risk and fraud mitigation through the detection of anomalies in financial transactions and customer history data, optimisation of telecommunications bandwidth through traffic analysis, and improved predictive maintenance and product recall processes, through enabling the analysis of bill-of-material, services records, and sensor data together.
SAP said Vora will be released to customers in late September, as well as a cloud-based developer edition.
Also announced this week were enhancements to the SAP HANA Cloud Platform, which, alongside Vora, are aimed at helping companies achieve digital transformation.
Among these enhancements are the previously announced SAP HANA Cloud Platform (HCP) for the IoT, which will be generally available in September; a new cloud trial of HCP gamification services, which allow developers to incorporate game concepts into new and existing applications; cloud trial access to Fiori and business services; SAP hybris as a Service on SAP HCP; and an SAP tax calculation service, which will provide tax determination and computation services as an API (available in limited trial).
(Read what Diginomica’s Dick Hirsch had to say about the new HANA Cloud Platform services here.)
