SAP Updates HANA, Forges Big Data Alliances at TechEd
SAP kicked off its TechED conference in Las Vegas this week just as the German business software maker announced strong third quarter results, buoyed in part by brisk demand for the company's HANA in-memory database platform and its growing cloud ecosystem.
“SAP HANA is the market’s most advanced in-memory database and we are well on our way to reach €1 billion in HANA software revenue since market launch,” said SAP co-CEOs Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe in company remarks. SAP's cloud already crossed the €1 billion ($1.4 billion U.S.) mark.
“We now are the second largest enterprise cloud company with an annual cloud revenue run rate exceeding €1 billion,” stated the executives. “We continue to gain market share and grow significantly faster than our primary competitor in all regions.”
HANA SP7
To keep that momentum going, SAP unveiled several upgrades that it will include in service pack 7 (SP7) for HANA. “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,” said SAP Executive Board member Dr. Vishal Sikka.
One of the company's goals is to bring more developers onto the platform with a simplified, “language-agnostic” experience to churn out applications faster. “Developers shall be able to take advantage of the core data services (CDS) and pre-packaged data quality libraries to foster reuse and rapid development,” boasted the company.
In a bid to enhance HANA's Big Data processing capabilities, the company's smart data access technology now sports write capabilities. In addition, Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server have been added to its data sources. Also new are custom text analysis dictionaries, creation capabilities and tighter Hadoop integration, courtesy of Hortonworks.
SAP is also launching new user experience (UX) design services based on SAP Fiori to help organizations “create end user-focused business scenarios and apps” based on HANA. Finally, the company announced a private beta of subscription-based HANA cloud infrastructure services. Plans call for 128 GB, 256 GB, 512 GB and 1 TB instances of main memory.
HANA Brings SAP and SAS Together
TechEd 2013 also served as the backdrop for the announcement of a major new alliance. SAP, and N.C.-based SAS announced a strategic partnership that will result in joint products that incorporate SAP HANA's in-memory technology and SAS' analytics expertise.
“By incorporating the in-memory SAP HANA platform into SAS applications and enabling SAS’ industry-proven advanced analytics algorithms to run on SAP HANA, decision makers will have the opportunity to leverage the value of real-time data analysis within their existing SAS and SAP HANA environments,” boasted the companies in a statement. Initially, the companies are targeting the financial services, telecommunications, retail, consumer products and manufacturing industries.
SAS CEO Jim Goodnight said in a statement that between the two big technology partners, “We have the expertise and the products to help ensure that our customers can see and act on the power of performing advanced data analysis within their database and not outside of it.” In other partner news, SAP also announced new, HANA-powered profit optimization offerings with Vendavo, a Big Data analytics specialist.
Harnessing Cloud for Mobile Security
The company also teased the cloud edition of SAP Mobile App Protection, which allows businesses to provide secure iOS and Android app experiences (in-house and third-party). The forthcoming service allows SAP “to offer customers a complete solution for mobile device, app and content security in the cloud,” promised the company.
Users of the HANA Enterprise Cloud service can now securely access business content and documents with a new SAP Mobile Documents release. It arrives with a new user interface, iPhone and Android support, document classification-based security policies and broader support for corporate content management systems.
Finally, SAP revealed a new secure mobile browser. Features include copy/paste protection, FIPS 140-2 data-at-rest encryption and “true per-app VPN capability,” according to the company.
Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at Enterprise Apps Today. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.
Pedro Hernandez contributes to Enterprise Apps Today, and 11Press, the technology network. He was previously the managing editor of Internet.com, an IT-related website network. He has expertise in Smart Tech, CRM, and Mobile Tech, Helping Banks and Fintechs, Telcos and Automotive OEMs, and Healthcare and Identity Service Providers to Protect Mobile Apps.
