By Eleanor Reader
The most important SAP announcements from Day Three of SAPPHIRE NOW.
SAP BusinessObjects BI version 4.1
The 4.1 version of the SAP BusinessObjects BI solutions have been released to customers.
The new advancements are designed to make the suite more unified and personal so customers can gain all their insights and information from one place, SAP stated.
Planned features of the release include SAP Lumira, support for Amazon Elastic MapReduce and Hadoop Hive, improved access to Oracle’s Exadata, OLAP and Essbase and new SAP Crystal Server software and the Edge edition of SAP BusinessObjects BI software tailored to small and midsize companies.
“This release will best serve our customer’s needs of providing end-users with autonomy while empowering IT to provide a BI solution that allows for standardising and sharing of information,” said Adam Binnie, general manager and global vice president, Business Intelligence, SAP.
“Our customers are demanding big data-ready solutions that seamlessly incorporate real time data streams and can handle multiple data sources.”
The latest features for the SAP HANA platform
SAP has shared its latest innovations on the SAP HANA platform, including features for big data and spatial processing.
One new feature is the introduction of smart data access technology for Hadoop and other heterogeneous data sources.
According to SAP, this will help customers build real-time big data applications while minimising unnecessary data transfers and data redundancy.
The platform will be further expanded with new spatial data processing capabilities “to combine geospatial data with business data, adding a new dimension to real-time business applications”, SAP stated.
A new version of SAP HANA One, a cloud offering introduced a few months ago which currently has around 600 customers, has also been announced.
The offering is packaged with access to a trial edition of SAP Lumira software and sample public datasets.
In addition, the premium edition of SAP HANA One is now available and is packaged with SAP HANA Cloud Integration “to provide integration with SAP systems and heterogeneous sources”.
Lastly, SAP announced that the integration of Sybase technologies on HANA is complete.
SAP and HP demonstrate system prototype
SAP and HP have demonstrated a prototype system using SAP HANA for the first time on the SAPPHIRE NOW stage.
The joint initiative, named ‘Project Kraken’, is a test system built from years of HP server technology innovations and optimised with the SAP HANA database for SAP Business Suite.
According to SAP, Project Kraken’s goal is to provide customers additional choice in scalability for large, online transaction processing applications, with requirements for real-time analytical insights into this data.
“The combination of our best technologies – SAP HANA with HP Converged Infrastructure – revolutionises in-memory computing to redefine the speed at which market leaders will soon operate, to speed transactions to a matter of seconds,” said Bill Veghte, chief operating officer, HP.
“With the collaboration of HP and SAP, organisations can consolidate online transaction and analytic processing into one place and perform real-time analytics at never-before-imagined speeds, while competitors continue to move data between multiple environments to access meaningful insights at a far slower pace.”
The prototype system, optimised with 16 Intel Xeon processor E7 family (codenamed Ivy Bridge-EX) central processing units (CPUs) and 12 terabytes of memory, has been engineered specifically for complex, data-intensive workloads, SAP stated.
These workloads include supply chain, customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP) and data analysis.
The desired outcome of the project, according to SAP, is to create a marketable solution capable of scaling to the highest levels of memory within a single server for speeding business operations.
Read all the SAP SAPPHIRE NOW news from Day One and Day Two.
