New Release of SAP HANA® Platform Helps Customers Better Manage Digital Transformation

FRANKFURT, Germany, Dec. 8, 2015 — (PRNewswire) —   SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today announced that companies are choosing the SAP HANA® platform as they digitize entire business models to stay relevant and competitive. SAP HANA is proving to be the great simplifier for helping customers by delivering rapid innovation with the release of the latest support package stack 11 (SPS 11) for the SAP HANA platform. This announcement was made at the SAP HANA Forum in Frankfurt, Germany, and the SAP Spotlight Tour in New York, being held on December 8, 2015.

"Customers are choosing SAP HANA not only to run core business applications but also to develop live applications that gain real-time insight to help drive growth and disrupt the competition," said Bernd Leukert, member of the Executive Board, Products and Innovation, SAP. "Only the SAP HANA platform simplifies IT while spurring innovation by combining in-memory database capabilities with built-in application services, advanced data processing and data integration in a single platform."

Simplified IT Helps Businesses Run Better

Customers such as Varian Medical Systems, which equips the world with radiology and X-ray tools that help fight cancer, are using SAP HANA to deliver real-time analytics and run mission-critical applications.

"Our mission is to focus our energy on saving lives," said Snehashish Sarkar, senior director, Varian Medical Systems. "With SAP HANA, we have achieved significant performance improvements across analytics and complex business processes. In addition, the SAP HANA platform is helping us simplify our IT landscape and improve user experiences. SAP HANA is providing us with a rock-solid foundation to support our business operations."

SAP HANA SPS 11 delivers new high-availability and disaster-recovery features, hardened security and unified administration for cloud and on-premise deployments. The new hot-standby feature enables organizations to regain faster takeover time when switching over to a secondary database that continuously replays log volumes from the primary database. The enhanced SAP HANA cockpit can now be used for offline administration and diagnosis.

SAP continues to demonstrate its commitment to openness by offering greater choice to customers. In SAP HANA SPS 11, enhancements for IBM Power Systems include support for SAP® Business Suite applications and enhancement to the SAP Business Warehouse application to support scale-out features and virtualization of production instances of SAP HANA for more flexible deployment options.

Accelerated Insights Help Companies Better Understand Their Business

PrescientTraveler is using SAP HANA to increase location intelligence and improve situational awareness.

"We rely on our decades of expertise in high-stakes intelligent operations, irregular warfare and threat analysis to keep international travelers safe," said Mike Bishop, chief systems architect for PrescientTraveler. "To deliver this service to millions of users, we selected the SAP HANA platform because of its unique ability to perform sentiment analysis and entity extraction on high volumes of social media and news articles and to provide the advanced geospatial analysis that allows us to identify and immediately alert subscribers who are in proximity of a dangerous situation."

The latest release of SAP HANA delivers enhanced text analytics, such as the ability to identify relationships among the elements of a sentence and improved language support for text-mining algorithms to help organizations gain greater insight from unstructured content. New spatial features such as clustering and the ability to partition spatial data help accelerate analysis and enrich location intelligence. In addition, a reverse geocoding capability enables organizations to pinpoint a location's latitude and longitude and display specific addresses within a given radius, which can help assess the impact of disaster or healthcare risk.

SAP HANA has also been certified with the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), which helps make it easier to exchange data between third-party spatial solutions. SAP announced today that ArcGIS will support SAP HANA as an enterprise geodatabase. Additionally, in response to growing interest by customers to leverage location intelligence in business applications, SAP and Esri intend to explore further integration of advanced Esri ArcGIS geospatial capabilities and content across the entire SAP application portfolio.

Business Transformation with Innovative Modern Apps

Customers such as Mercedes-AMG are leveraging SAP HANA for advanced analytics to re-imagine business processes.

"The testing of our engines is an essential process to ensure the quality of our performance vehicles and sports cars," said Reinhard Breyer, head of IT, Mercedes-AMG GmbH. "By combining business data powered by SAP HANA with sensor technology, we can use predictive analytics to improve our testing scenarios, optimize development and reduce production costs."

SAP HANA SPS 11 now delivers over 70 predictive algorithms including those that run on live streaming, series and spatial data. These algorithms can adapt and self-improve to facilitate machine learning and automate processes. In addition, new adapters to applications such as SAP Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence and SAP Plant Connectivity software can significantly improve operational efficiency.

In addition, the application server in SAP HANA SPS 11 has been re-architected to scale independently from database services, enabling developers to deploy highly scalable applications. New programming languages including Java and JavaScript on Node.js are supported to offer developers greater flexibility, while support for open source code management tools such as Git/GitHub and Maven streamline development processes. With its new microservice architecture, SAP HANA supports rapid development of forward-looking, modern applications that can be frequently updated using independently deployable services.

With the latest release of SAP HANA, large data volumes can be managed transparently with policy-based data movement from memory-based to disk-based technology and Hadoop using the data lifecycle management capability of the SAP HANA data warehousing foundation. This allows organizations to fully optimize performance-price considerations based on business needs. A new connector optimizes performance and enables creation of virtual tables in SAP HANA Vora™ technology, which streamlines processing to dramatically accelerate data analysis on Hadoop.

Adoption of SAP HANA on the Rise

According to a recent Americas' SAP Users' Group (ASUG) survey of 1,253 respondents, adoption of SAP HANA is steadily increasing and more projects based on SAP HANA are in the pipeline.

"The survey shows a definite trend among ASUG members on increasing HANA adoption, and I fully expect that to continue," said Kevin Reilly, ASUG's SAP S/4HANA Community Advocate, in the survey report. "The high percentage of successful SAP HANA implementations is likely a result of two factors: delivering SAP HANA on an appliance, plus the full-court press of support from SAP to ensure positive results."

Keynotes and some sessions of the SAP HANA Forum in Frankfurt, Germany and the SAP Spotlight Tour in New York will be broadcasted live with Periscope via @SAPTV. For more information, visit the SAP HANA blog and SAP News Center. Follow SAP on Twitter at @sapnews.

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 296,100 customers to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and grow sustainably. For more information, visit www.sap.com.

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