SAP Readies SAP HANA Platform for Mission-Critical Applications in the Enterprise

MADRID, Nov. 14, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- [ SAP AG ] (NYSE: [ SAP ]) today announced the SAP HANA® platform support pack stack 5 (SPS5) to power mission-critical transactional and analytical applications in one platform. SAP HANA will further collapse the architectural layers between application and data processing. It will converge database services for transaction, analytics, text and predictive processing together with application services for the application server, planning, rules and event stream processing within one in-memory based architecture. SAP HANA SPS5 will also support large-scale data center deployments with expanded support for high availability, disaster recovery and security. In addition, SAP is aggressively fostering open innovation with more than 150 startups delivering solutions on top of SAP HANA as well as introducing a certification program planned to support best-of-breed third-party business intelligence (BI), ETL and back-up/recovery solutions. The announcement was made at [ SAPPHIRE® NOW + SAP® TechEd ], being held as a co-located event in Madrid from November 13-16.

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"We made a bold commitment earlier this year to deliver mission-critical applications on the SAP HANA platform and we have reached that goal with our own CRM solution powered by SAP HANA," said Vishal Sikka, member of the SAP Executive Board, Technology & Innovation. "Besides SAP solutions, we're also seeing groundbreaking innovations from over 150 startups and partners building purposeful big data solutions on top of the SAP HANA platform."

SAP HANA SPS5 to Collapse Layers to Enable Real-Time Enterprise
New features in SAP HANA will help further eliminate the inherent latency and complexity that exist in today's application architecture. Converging data and application processing all within one in-memory platform architecture will help companies gain insight in real time. Key features in SAP HANA will include:

Single environment for transactional (OLTP) and analytical (OLAP) data processing: SAP HANA will be both a read-optimized column store ideally suited for OLAP applications and a write-optimized row store suited for OLTP applications, such as the [ SAP® 360 Customer solution ].
Natural language-based text analytics: By expanding advanced text search with natural language processing, organizations will be able to process text and social sentiment data within SAP HANA to filter files, identify entities and analyze sentiment across 31 languages.
Expanding predictive analytics for SAP HANA: SAP HANA will continue to expand on embedded predictive algorithms to enable enterprises to perform segmentation and clustering analyses to identify and retain profitable customers, improve upsell opportunities and detect fraud. New predictive analysis library functions for SAP HANA SPS5 will include classification, clustering, outlier detection and data preparation algorithms. In addition, SAP HANA will also support predictive model markup language (PMML) for the integration and sharing of predictive models. The additional native predictive functions within the in-memory SAP HANA database engine will allow developers, partners and customers to continue developing powerful and fast predictive applications on the platform.
Expanding extended application services for SAP HANA: New [ extended application services ] in SAP HANA will deliver native application server capabilities as a service to help developers quickly develop and deploy 2 and 2½ tier applications directly within the SAP HANA platform using HTLM5, Javascript, SQLScript, XML/A, JSON and ODATA. Additionally, these services can be exposed for consumption by device-based applications or by other application servers.
- Enhanced business rules management: Business rules management in SAP HANA will be a core component of the extended application services built into SAP HANA. This will empower developers to easily add business rules to their applications without embedding these directly within software codes. These rules are designed to be easily maintained by end users without writing code and through a simple intuitive interface. It will have the ability to simulate, mine for trends and patterns and modify physical data based on actions.
- Application functional library framework: Developers can easily access embedded algorithms and business functions through extended application service capabilities via SQLScript or JavaScript. This new level of support will make it easier for developers to build applications that embed advanced analytics.

Additional SAP Real-Time Data Platform Features in Support of SAP HANA
In addition to delivering SAP HANA SPS5, the flagship in-memory solution within the SAP real-time data platform, SAP also plans to add real-time stream data processing and enhanced enterprise information management (EIM) capabilities to the SAP HANA platform to further consolidate data processing and deliver real-time and accurate insights.

Real-time stream data processing support: High velocity, streaming data typically produced by machines, financial exchanges and massive websites will be able to be processed in real time using SAP® Sybase® Event Stream Processor (SAP Sybase ESP), enabling organizations to identify significant events that impact business. Organizations will be able to efficiently store events identified by SAP Sybase ESP directly into SAP HANA in high speed for storage and further analysis. Additionally, SAP Sybase ESP will be able to take advantage of the real-time analytic features of SAP HANA to evaluate complex decisions based on deep multi-sourced data in SAP HANA.
Common modeling environment across data stores via SAP® Sybase® PowerDesigner, is intended to enable organizations to develop a logical information view regardless of where data is stored.
High-performance bulk loading of data into SAP HANA or SAP Sybase IQ from a variety of new data sources including Hadoop via SAP® Data Services software is planned to be available.
Enhanced data profiling user interface is planned to enable business users to manage metadata as business terms, monitor data quality scorecards and identify data quality issues across the enterprise — no matter where the data resides — via SAP® Information Steward software.

SAP HANA Platform for Large-Scale Data Center Deployment
With SAP HANA SPS5, SAP plans to expand support for SAP HANA deployments in enterprise data centers for 24/7 operation. High availability of SAP HANA with hot and warm standby servers is planned to be added. Integrations to third-party backup tools are intended to be expanded to deliver synchronized backup for improved disaster tolerance, with the option to fail over to a remote data center. Security enhancements such as encryption to protect data at rest and enhanced authentication, access authorization and audit logging capabilities are also planned to be included.

To help lower the cost of SAP HANA deployment, multiple instances of the SAP HANA database are intended to be deployed in single SAP HANA appliance for development, testing and sandboxing use.

To illustrate the readiness of SAP HANA for large scale-out deployment, SAP has published a white paper, "[ SAP HANA One Petabyte Performance ]," which details the performance of SAP HANA conducting queries against 1 petabyte of enterprise data containing 10 years of transactional history holding 1.2 trillion records.

SAP HANA Platform Fosters Open Ecosystem Co-Innovation
The partner ecosystem for SAP HANA continues to expand, with more than 150 startups now in the SAP Startup Focus program and eight independent software vendors (ISVs) building innovation on the SAP HANA platform. SAP is also introducing additional third-party certification programs to foster BI, ETL and back-up tools to integrate with SAP HANA in order to provide wider user enablement, data sourcing and reuse of existing investments. This program will help ensure that the third-party tools adhere to the SAP HANA connectivity, security, supported structure requirements and take advantage of innovative functionalities for SAP HANA. In addition, client interfaces such as ODBC and JDBC will be open for customers and partners to create applications and solutions on SAP HANA.

For announcements, blog posts, videos and other coverage during SAPPHIRE NOW + SAP TechEd Madrid, visit the [ Events Newsroom ].

SAPPHIRE® NOW + SAP® TechEd Madrid
In 2012, SAP again brings together its largest ecosystem education event series with its premier customer conference for a co-located event being held in Madrid, Spain, from November 13-16. With [ SAPPHIRE® NOW ], SAP offers its customers, partners, and prospects even more opportunities to engage in dialogue with peers, participants and thought leaders around the globe, and can gain insight as to how SAP is delivering on its product strategy and helping organizations around the world to run better. [ SAP® TechEd ] brings IT managers, software developers, administrators, and business process experts together to learn in an interactive environment directly from the experts responsible for cutting-edge SAP technology. The co-located event provides access to the entire SAP ecosystem and enables attendees to learn how SAP can help their organizations run like never before. Follow on Twitter at [ @SAPPHIRENOW ] and [ @SAPTechEd ], and join the conversation at [ #SAPPHIRENOW ] and [ #SAPTechEd ].

About SAP
As market leader in enterprise application software, SAP (NYSE: [ SAP ]) helps companies of all sizes and industries run better. From back office to boardroom, warehouse to storefront, desktop to mobile device – SAP empowers people and organizations to work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively to stay ahead of the competition. SAP applications and services enable more than 197,000 customers to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and grow sustainably. For more information, visit [ www.sap.com ].

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SAP Readies SAP HANA Platform for Mission-Critical Applications in the Enterprise