SAP Brings New HANA, Analytics To Market

6 Causes Of Big Data Discrepancies

SAP has announced the release of service pack 10 (SPS10) for the SAP HANA platform. The service pack delivers new capabilities addressing the Internet of Things (IoT) at enterprise scale, big data management, data high availability, and new application development. 

The new remote data synchronization feature allows organizations to synchronize data between the enterprise core and network edge systems. IoT and data-intensive mobile apps can leverage SAP HANA remote data synchronization between the enterprise and remote locations using SAP SQL Anywhere.

Mike Eacrett is VP of product management currently working on HANA's in-memory computing and data warehousing product strategy. In a telephone interview with InformationWeek, Eacrett said that HANA in the IoT is all about the collection and management of data. "How do you acquire the data and send it to the edge? Remote data synch is all about how to do this," Eacrett said.

[ SAP has been talking about HANA ... a lot. Read HANA, Hadoop Help SAP Connect IoT And Big Data. ]

Service management and predictive maintenance were two significant use-cases Eacrett mentioned for the new capabilities in HANA. "This new set of capabilities gives HANA access to all the endpoint data in functions that are included in HANA rather than being third-party apps," he said, noting, "IoT isn't just about dumping things in a data lake but working with the data in actual apps."

Data lakes and big data represent another key area of improvement in SPS10. The new HANA version brings the expanded smart data integration capabilities of SAP HANA to the latest Hadoop distributions from Cloudera and Hortonworks. Chandran Saravana, senior director of advanced analytics marketing, said in an InformationWeek interview that Spark support and the entire Transportation layer are much improved. He also noted that, with the SAP HANA connection, you can do an end-to-end predictive model.

Predictive modeling can involve time-intensive processing, but IoT applications require real-time analysis. Saravana said the new 2.2 version of the data analytics suite includes several features that reduce the time required for predictive analysis. "The big one is that the tool will automatically parse many of the variables in the data set, and the system will tell you which variables are the best for telling you what you want to know," he said.

Saravana said that the predictive suite can work with databases of up to 15,000 columns, decreasing the need for data reduction. In addition, he said, "It doesn't have to be HANA. Heterogeneous network layer, edge layer -- all can be analyzed in SAP tools."

Eacrett said that size isn't the only function improved in 2.2. "Spatial analytics were initially delivered 2.5 years ago, and they're now adding support for multi-dimensional objects." He explained that depth, flow-rates, time, and other object qualities can be expressed in variables used by the analytics system. Expressions and other data types can support the additional dimensions. Furthermore, the applications for the new functions have fewer limitations than in earlier versions. It's not just the typical BI thing but actual OLTP analysis," Eacrett said.

According to a statement announcing the new versions, HANA uptake in enterprise use remains high. SAP says that SAP HANA currently has more than 6,400 customers, almost doubling from one year ago. SAP HANA Cloud Platform has approximately 1,400 customers. In addition, there are more than 815,000 active users of SAP HANA.