SAP is taking fierce steps towards expanding its cloud presence. Major moves from the German software company are reshaping its approach to a market increasingly willing to move to the cloud and an increasing number of big competitors wanting to rule this market.

After having acquired Ariba and SuccessFactors, SAP is taking a logical step by taking its flagship offering HANA to the cloud. Read the rest of this entry »

SAP has announced SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud service, taking the logical but no less important step of taking its SAP HANA platform to the cloud, giving organizations a new deployment option for the in-memory platform.

The SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud service will enable organizations to run mission-critical instances of SAP’s enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and Netweaver Business Warehouse solutions in the cloud, powered by HANA.

SAP plans to deliver the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud through its partners within what SAP calls an “open + us” strategy, offering the capabilities from the partner data centers and/or SAP’s own data centers located worldwide. Read the rest of this entry »

For a long time, PROS Inc. was a prominent pricing management software provider for both business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) industries. Lately, however, the vendor has been leveraging its decades-long experience in handling large volumes of data to provide big data applications for sales effectiveness (pricing being only a part thereof). In other words, PROS now delivers prescriptive analytics and data science to help customers identify sales opportunities, develop offers, and set prices.

PROS has announced that it has signed an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) agreement with SAP to embed the SAP HANA platform with its big data apps. SAP HANA is a real-time in-memory database platform that streamlines analytics, planning, predictive, and sentiment assessments to allow business to operate in real time.

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SAP and VMWare will now offer another deployment architecture for SAP HANA. During the SAPPHIRE NOW conference in Madrid, SAP announced the upcoming availability of SAP HANA on VMWare vSphere 5.1 for testing and development.

SAP’s customers will have the ability to provide instances of SAP HANA in virtual machines faster, use advanced datacenter capabilities of VMware vSphere such as Dynamic Resource Scheduling and vSphere vMotion, and more easily configure their testing and development environments over the cloud.

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During SAP’s SAPPHIRE NOW conference in Madrid, the recent support pack for HANA was released (SPS5), providing additional capabilities to HANA’s functionality set. Along with enhancements for mission-critical applications, SAP has worked on HANA’s architecture to collapse the different layers of the platform—data and application, so that both reside within an in-memory-based architecture. Read the rest of this entry »

During SAP’s TechEd event in Las Vegas, SAP announced that in an agreement with Amazon, SAP HANA can be used on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud and will be available immediately via the AWS Marketplace as an offering called SAP HANA One. Read the rest of this entry »

During SAP’s TechEd event, SAP unveiled its plans for delivering SAP HANA in the cloud—SAP HANA Cloud, an in-memory cloud platform offering. SAP’s cloud platform will include some important offerings: Read the rest of this entry »

In his keynote speech at this week’s Oracle OpenWorld, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison fired a shot across the bow of SAP’s HANA. The fourth generation of Oracle’s Exadata X3 Database In-Memory Machine was announced as part of the company’s infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) solution offerings. The marketing battle heated up when Mr. Ellison let slip that SAP has something a bit smaller. “I think her name is HANA.” Read the rest of this entry »

My recent article SAP SCM – Stepping Out of (Relative) Obscurity analyzed SAP’s revamped comprehensive supply chain management (SCM) suite, its major components, and its supply chain process bundles. In addition to receiving a number of public comments and ratings by TEC’s readers, I was recently roasted privately during a lunch meeting with a couple of peers.

Namely, they expressed their surprise at the quite positive tone of the article, and at the lack of my typical skepticism (and sometimes sarcasm). Well, perhaps I am a sucker for a good “big picture” vision, and it seemed to me that SAP had created a compelling strategic story. The ideas such as the “Visual Enterprise” sounded refreshing to me, especially after several years of SAP being quiet on the Line of Business (LOB) applications delivery front. At the end of the day, it was important to highlight that the solutions that SAP is offering for supply chain executives expand across the traditional TLA (three letter acronym) boundaries of SCM, product lifecycle management (PLM), customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), manufacturing execution system (MES), etc.

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A recent note that landed on my plate really grabbed my attention: As part of a long partnership, Microsoft and SAP jointly gave a demo in which Microsoft Kinect was used to exploit SAP’s HANA capabilities. Seeing data being managed by a motion-based device made me want to write a post speculating about the way users and computers will interact in the future. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday SAP announced its strategy to provide small and medium enterprises (SMEs) with the services of the SAP HANA platform via SAP HANA analytics for SAP Business One and the SAP HANA Edge Edition. Read the rest of this entry »

It is hard to imagine that organizations like SAP or former Business Objects (BO)—now a division of SAP—were once start-up companies. Nowadays on the business intelligence (BI) scene it’s almost impossible to avoid the BO initialism. Like many other successful companies, SAP has grown into itself by offering a product that applied a radical approach to a business problem solution, and this is particularly true of its BO stack of BI solutions. In this installment of my Thinking Radically interview series, I had the pleasure to speak with Timo Elliott, a prominent personality in the BI space. Read the rest of this entry »

A note last week from Bradenton.com announced the availability of SAP High-Performance Analytic Appliance (HANA), as well as it’s the release of SAP BusinessObjects Strategic Workforce Planning Application as the first application to take advantage of SAP HANA. Read the rest of this entry »