With the high-impact arrival of Big Data, many CIOs are already beginning to think about what the next “big” thing will be in IT.
SAP is putting its bets, and its future, on Predictive Analytics.
Predictive analytics represents the logical convergence of analytics, Big Data and predictive tools, and many companies are already adding it to their roadmaps. SAP hopes to leverage predictive analytics to grow their market share, and early indications show SAP has an inside advantage with their revolutionary HANA (High performance Analytic Appliance) technology.
At a high level, SAP HANA is an in-memory database that supports both columnar and row storage. In other words, HANA is remarkably fast. We’re not talking about just an order of magnitude faster. We’re talking about 3,600 times faster than legacy database engines. HANA is well-suited for real-time analysis of unstructured data and can be deployed on a premise-based appliance or in the Cloud.
SAP HANA is a game-changer for analytics and for SAP. After years of building solutions where support for third-party database engines from IBM, Microsoft and Oracle was a requirement, SAP is now forging a future on its own technology using SAP HANA and Sybase IQ to run all of its applications—transactional, analytical and reporting—simultaneously. Yet HANA is even more powerful when it’s deployed in conjunction with other solutions, such as SAP HANA + Apache Hadoop or SAP HANA + VMware. For example, running a SAP HANA solution on a virtualized VMware environment opens up the opportunity to deploy analytics in the Cloud and scale to handle thousands of concurrent users, which in turn opens the door to Software as a Service (SaaS) or Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings.
Another vendor working closely with the SAP HANA platform is HP. HP’s HANA Hawk appliance leverages HP’s 3PAR scale out data storage and ProLiant Gen8 servers to deliver massive processing capabilities—up to 240 CPUs and 12TB of in-memory data in a single appliance—to help enterprises take advantage of HANA’s amazing speeds and scale.
Today, SAP HANA is available in a variety of bundled offerings with partner solutions including:
- SAP HANA database software deployed on hardware from HP, IBM, Cisco, Dell and others;
- HANA-optimized bundles with VMware’s VCE/vBlock, HP Converged System, etc.;
- SAP HANA deployed on the SUSE Linux operating system;
- Integrated solutions with BusinessObjects, SAP NetWeaver and other applications;
- Cloud-based solutions on platforms from VMware, HP, IBM, Amazon Web Services, AT&T, Savvis, Virtustream, etc.
If you really want to see what SAP HANA can do, talk to AdvizeX. Our SAP technology lab is set up to show you how powerful SAP HANA can be across a variety of scenarios including live and customizable demos for:
- SAP Business Warehouse (BW) on HANA;
- SAP Enterprise Central Component (ECC) on HANA;
- SAP ECC/BW/Landscape Transformation (SLT) in a virtualized HANA environment;
- SAP HANA on VCE vBlock;
- HP’s SAP HANA Hawk appliance.
We offer demos featuring a variety of master and transactional data, KPIs, business use cases and applications for pharma, telecom, oil & gas, healthcare, retail and other industries. We invite you to test a specific demo or proof of concept in our labs, or use our labs to run your own internal demo and see the power of Predictive Analytics in action. ▪