SAP HANA leads to rejuvenation of SAP big data software

SAP smart meter analytics and SAP COPA accelerator software are the newcomers, each of which, says the company, will "change the way people think, work, plan and operate". The announcement came at SAP TEchEd 2011, being held in Las Vegas this week, and indicates that SAP is taking its own medicine, along the lines of its Business Objects strategic workforce planning application, launched at the end of last year, which also harnesses SAP HANA. Both of the new applications are designed to give people real-time insights into what SAP terms 'big data', allowing them to include vast data sets for analysis, planning, forecasting or simulations in a more fluid way than traditional sequential processing dictates. "There is a massive simplification happening all around us," comments Dr Vishal Sikka, SAP's executive board member for technology and innovation. "Layers are being dissolved at an unbelievable pace [as] people, businesses, data and machines are becoming more directly connected. "This virtuous cycle of connectedness leads to disintermediation of layers, which drives end-users to become more empowered and demand better user-experience — challenging us to create more connectedness," he adds. For him, HANA is about leading a "fundamental renewal and reshaping" of the IT industry. "SAP HANA removes the inefficiencies that have developed over time, but also delivers [an] unbelievable user experience, simultaneously enabling new horizons and simplification of the existing layers of complexity, without disruption." China's largest bottled water producer Nongfu Spring, which has now deployed SAP HANA to optimise its business with real-time data processing, would no doubt agree. The company went live on 20 August with the largest implementation to date of SAP HANA in China, with the system capable of enabling visualisation of its seven production bases and dozens of factories. According to Patrick Hoo, CIO of Nongfu Spring, achieving real-time visibility was critical for the company to grow, improve efficiency and reduce costs. In the past, he says that due to the data volumes, it took more than a day for the company to work with its point-of-sales and channel sales data. "We were able to replace our data mart, based on Oracle 11g database, with SAP HANA and achieved three goals: fast data display, highly efficient business logic operations and real-time data synchronisation," states Hoo. "For example, we found that the script in the SAP HANA studio was returning results 200 to 300 times faster than the same script in PL/SQL in Oracle. This query performance improvement was consistent across our 150 reports. We are seeing smooth operations, accurate data and fast performance in our production environment."