SAP highlights partnerships and new integrations with HANA upgrade
SAP doubled down on HANA as its future technology platform for running all of its own applications, plus integrating with partners and customers as it announced a major update to its in-memory database at its Sapphire Now conference in Orlando on Wednesday.
The newly released service pack 8 (SP8) pushes HANA further into SAP’s own applications, giving it new capabilities to run more predictive algorithms and new tie-ins to SAP products. For example users can now run searches for attachments within SAP Business Suite, scour the time-dependent hierarchy of SAP Human Capital Management, apply business rules to SAP Fraud Management and offload graph engine capabilities for SAP Medical Insight. But the update goes beyond that and includes new integration with some key enterprise IT partners as well as opening up HANA for use by custom enterprise applications and third-party plugins.
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SAP is elevating the importance of its partner group, says Bob Elliott, country manager for SAP Canada. He acknowledges that as the person reasonable for revenue from Canada, he’s often focused on quarter-to-quarter results and could use some help building out the partnerships that might not deliver results immediately but are important long term. He says it’s common knowledge within SAP that for every $1 in revenue made by SAP, there’s $8 to $10 to be had in the wider ecosystem.
“Our focus on partnerships continues to increase as the world becomes open source and other cloud-based companies gain more traction,” Elliott says. “It’s the most efficient way to manage the complexities.”
If there’s one over-arching theme linking all of SAP’s new partnerships and integration capability announcements, it’s the message that customers can benefit by migrating to the cloud. Ask any SAP spokesperson at Sapphire, or their new partners about the cloud and they’ll tell you how they’re ready to help your organization make the move there. And when the move is made, it’s celebrated – Elliott took a moment to sip champagne passed around at a booth of a client that had just finished a cloud migration project for its ERP system.
“Every type of partnership we’re looking at now has some cloud aspect to it,” he says. “Customers expect SAP to lead them to do the cloud and to do it in either an aggressive overhaul or a more gradual way. They know they can count on SAP to keep their enterprise apps running.”
SAP’s in-house benefit of HANA upgrade
One SAP product benefitting from the new raft of updates is Lumira, an analytics visualization technology that offers a free version for download. Enterprise users can now deploy Lumira on the HANA cloud to tie in to their data sets and can also plug-in to MongoDB, an open source data base technology that’s widely used. The updates are good, says Nick Smith, the director of analytics for SAP, because it demonstrates his employer’s openness and flexibility.
“As data continues to grow and different ways of consumption along with it, we need relevant information quickly and wherever we are,” he says. “The ability to get the data I need to do my job is critical.”
Lumira also integrates into SAP BusinessObjects data and any corporate business intelligence platform you happen to use. Lumira is in a sense the face of HANA because any time you see a visualization of HANA data, it’s likely been generated by Lumira, Smith says. SAP’s focus is on using it as a way to communicate data insights to any user (yes, even non-technical line of business managers) through any channel – whether it’s served up by a mobile app or in a web page.
“There’s a pretty big investment in making sure Lumira is open and can be embedded anywhere,” he says. “It’s these types of serving up visual discoveries and adding advanced capabilities we’ll see more of in the future.”
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