Latest on SAP HANA

HANA :an extraordinarily strong transaction processor

2012-06-09T18:34:00.001+05:30

Virtualization technology made it feasible for databases of gigabyte or even terabyte size to be managed entirely in memory. This accomplishment has breathed new life into a space that hadn't seen a lot of action in the last decade. Venerable players like SAP (parent company of Sybase) are finding new ways not only to compete with Oracle but potentially exceed it. It has also opened the door for VMware to break into the database space with SQLFire. This technology, paired with a big-data storage system like Hadoop, is making customers wonder what the advantage of Oracle or SQL Server is supposed to be.

The ability to manage large databases in memory is a game-changer in a variety of activities and industries. "Having millions of people connecting to an application that's underpinned by a spinning disk, it's just not going to return information fast enough," remarks David McJannet, VMware's director of cloud and application services, in an interview with ReadWriteWeb. "You see it when people are scanning with a barcode reader or with their cell phone. They scan something, and then they wait three, four, five seconds for the answer to come back. That experience is not acceptable for most new applications, where people expect near-instant response regardless of where they are."

Fire in the Hole

The emerging space of in-memory database systems now includes VMware SQLFire, SAP HANA and Oracle's TimesTen for Exalogic (through a 2005 acquisition). All of these were designed as pure transactional databases for storage, retrieval and updating of records. However, they're being marketed differently in order to break into some market, somewhere. TimesTen, for example, is often treated as a cache for Exalogic, as something that extends rather than replaces the Exalogic experience. That makes sense from a company that doesn't want to cannibalize its own product line but also would prefer not to be eaten alive. HANA is an extraordinarily strong transaction processor, but is being marketed by SAP as an analytics system, better suited to online analytical processing (OLAP) applications. Today, SAP is pairing HANA with another of its acquisitions, SuccessFactors, in hopes that a killer app will expose HANA to a wider audience.

SQLFire's value proposition is what media marketers would call a "pure play" and, as such, is more of a gamble on VMware's part. Having no legacy database platform of its own to cannibalize, VMware is in a position to market SQLFire as a faster transactional processing system than most anything currently deployed - as an all-around player, not an extension or an add-on. And although SQLFire may be well-suited for typical online transaction processing (OLTP) applications that utilize relatively simple schemae, as virtualization systems like VMware's vFabric become more adept, the schematic differences may become negligible.

"Disk is the new tape," proclaims VMware's McJannet. "It's considered to be a permanent mechanism, but not really appropriate for the main day-to-day interaction with data. I think SAP HANA is a fascinating example of this trend coming to life. With SAP HANA, I think the way we would describe it is to say there's huge disruption going on in the data landscape. We think of it in three different directions: One, there's clearly a move to Big Data, where the volumes of data that people are working with are massively different today than they were a few years ago. That's largely about how to do analytics on Big Data volumes, and you see technologies like Hadoop really coming to the fore there. [Two,] we believe there's a similar shift that we would refer to as 'Fast Data,' which is really about this shift to in-memory to accomodate these new kinds of applications. People expect near-instantaneous response at a scale that really didn't exist five to 10 years ago. So as a category, we see a huge shift towards in-memory at the data tier. And SAP, with HANA, is clearly perfectly aligned to this shift. For analytics applications around the SAP data warehouse, they're saying, let's push that into memory so that I can return analytics information for my users far faster than if that data were all stored on a spinning disk."

source: http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2012/06/vmwares-database-play-disk-is-the-new-tape.php

For Univ. of Kentucky, SAP's HANA is 'disruptive'

2012-06-05T21:03:00.001+05:30

The University of Kentucky says it has reshaped its business intelligence (BI) capability as a result of adopting SAP's in-memory system, HANA. Vince Kellen, the university CIO, calls it a "disruptive technology," and for this institution at least, that appears true.

Analysts are more restrained in their assessments of HANA, in part, because of a tug of war between so-called engineered systems, represented by something like Oracle's Exadata platform, and systems that use x86 hardware platforms such as HANA.

Whether the one-year-old HANA system succeeds for SAP may depend, in part, on whether it gets new customers for the company. University of Kentucky is already an SAP customer.

But none of these tech industry issues change how the university used SAP's in-memory technology to reshape its business intelligence services.

Kullen said the university was searching for ways to improve retention rates of its students and boost number of students who graduate.

The university collects detailed data about student retention at various stages of academic progress. It has course history, grades, class attendance data from the classes that track it, and engagement data -- a measure of student participation in virtual classroom spaces, including discussions and assignment downloads.

"All of that engagement information gives us clues as to what is going on with student retention," said Kullen.

The university initially wanted to identify students that may be having problems and to create automated workflows to proactively contact students and faculty, with activities ranging from a simple email poke to tutoring services.

But getting at that information is difficult. Typically, it would have involved building a data warehouse and then employing ETL activities (extract, transformation and load). But with HANA, the university was able to use real-time replication right from SAP systems that collect this data, via HANA-ready feeds.

"We saw the opportunity to transform how our business intelligence teams work," said Kullen.

Instead of manually aggregating data and running batch processes, the university's approximately 14-member BI team has morphed from being "back office plumbers" to serving as "advisors and model builders for our users," said Kullen.

The new system has been in production for about a month, and it will take time to see what impact it has on student retention, said Kullen.

The system was built on Dell hardware, and the university is using the vendor's services. Dell has developed student retention data models for the school, and has made them part of their services offerings.

Burk Buechler, portfolio director for Dell application services, said the company built the university system in two phases. It first got HANA deployed and connected to key data points, then built analytical dashboards.

Underlying the broader use of HANA is whether to use x86 systems or so-called engineered systems, which include IBM's recently announced PureSystems approach.

Engineered systems offer performance gains, meaning faster time to realize value and "less cumbersome" management, said Alys Woodward, a research director at IDC. On the other hand, "software on commodity hardware reduces vendor lock-in and enables the use of cheaper components," said Woodward.

How SAP HANA "will play in the broader marketplace -- outside SAP's core install base -- against Oracle Exadata and IBM engineered systems, depends to some extent on how these two opposing concepts will play out," said Woodward. IBM's recently announced PureSystems fits into the engineered system category.

Boris Evelson, an analyst at Forrester, said that whether HANA is the right approach depends on how it is being used. HANA is much more applicable to those cases where business requirements change all the time. That means the queries change frequently as well. HANA is less applicable to stable, status quo environments, he said.

It's also important to recognize whether HANA is solving problems that could be solved in some other way. Typical BI challenges include things like poor data quality, which are problems HANA will not solve, said Evelson.

HANA is also expensive, said Evelson, but it can deliver "solid ROI" if it is being used for the right reasons. It can compress data more efficiently in memory, and users can save time and money by not having to constantly tune and retune queries, he said.

Source: Computerworld

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9227256/For_Univ._of_Kentucky_SAP_s_HANA_is_disruptive_?taxonomyId=18&pageNumber=1

The Cloud's Killer App? SAP's Bid to Own the Enterprise Social Space

2012-06-01T02:12:00.002+05:30

If you measure the social activity inside enterprise-class networks, it may look like LinkedIn has a lock on the market. But if you study how employees actually connect with each other every day, Facebook is almost always the platform of choice. But because it's not really geared for businesses, it may be vulnerable to services that address needs tied specifically to the workplace. And SAP - of all companies - feels it may have the keys to the enterprise social space, including a supremely fast database and a way for employees to maintain a social profile based on her or his talents.

"The cloud is the ultimate fabric where all the data resides," says Dinesh Sharma, SAP's vice president for cloud marketing, speaking with ReadWriteWeb, "whether it's data we own, or aggregations of data from other places that all come together through Web APIs - that drives avolume of data. You have access to it, and because applications are so easy to consume, it's a perfect fit for the real-time insights that HANA can produce."

Sharma is outlining a strategy based on the success (which has yet to be proven, of course) of two key factors. One is HANA, which utilizes surprisingly ordinary database management schemes, but whose tables and schemas are arranged in large pools of memory rather than storage devices. That relocation of the proverbial operation table can, statistics indeed show, accelerate certain aspects of database applications by six orders of magnitude.

That's at the cloud end of the SAP strategy spectrum. At the other end - the part that faces the user directly - is SuccessFactors, the human capital management service that SAP acquired last December. If you think of Facebook as the caretaker of people's personal social affairs, consider SuccessFactors (along with competitors like talent management service Taleo, recently acquired by Oracle) as competing to be the caretaker of their personal business portfolios, their onlinecurriculum vitae.

Now that Monster.com's development appears to have calcified, LinkedIn has pointed the way toward the need for people to not only build but demonstrate their skills, using tools that go way beyond resumes. SuccessFactors is designed to be mined by talent scouts, looking not just for folks whose work history contains key phrases, but for opportunities to build the skill sets of interested and interesting people into the perfect fit for key positions long-term. (By "long-term," I mean longer than six months.)

Picture if you will a talent management worker in the human resources department of a major enterprise. On her tablet is a tool that would let her search for multiple people throughout the workforce who would be best suited to work together as a team on a collective project, sorted in order by their estimated availability and proximity to the place of business. The tool would have to judge these workers' interest and attitudes based on such factors as what they tweet, what products they've liked on Facebook and what tech news stories they've commented on. Even with the best database management schemes in the world, it would be quite a considerable query, consuming tremendous resources and time.

It's the sort of job that could use being accelerated by six orders of magnitude. And there you see the connection.

SAP's Sharma points out that the common usage model for applications preferred by folks in college or emerging from it today is tremendously different from the usage model of 2000 - the key difference being the social component. Any new functionality delivered to that customer - the ones entering the workforce with the skills that talent managers want most - must be geared toward interoperability and shareability. It cannot sit on a hard drive.

"If you're a major company, you probably run your infrastructure on SAP already today. We're providing these applications with these capabilities, and then also giving a level of openness so that you add them at a time and pace of your choosing," says Sharma. "It's not monolithic... Monolithic applications, even those in the cloud, start to morph toward a collection of thousands of services, that are pulled together on an as-needed basis to solve one problem, but then combine in a different way to solve a different problem. It's an intriguing option."

Source:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2012/05/the-clouds-killer-app-saps-bid-to-own-the-enterprise-social-space.php

SAP bets on data management offering to beat rival Oracle

2012-06-01T02:07:00.000+05:30

Technology major SAP has unveiled a strategy based on its HANA platform, which can crunch data in real time, to compete against rival enterprise software provider Oracle's hard-disk based database software.

In a big push into the enterprises databases segment, SAP is going to market with its HANA database, Sybase mobile technologies and integrating it with its bread and butter ERP offerings.

With this, SAP has now launched a new data management offering that helps companies in retail, utilities, financial services and others make informed decisions based on real time data.

INDIA-FOCUSED

Currently, SAP is the fourth largest database provider after Oracle, IBM and Microsoft. Further, the company is of the opinion that its HANA database platform is designed keeping in mind challenges faced by Indian enterprises.

“Our HANA database platform has an affinity to high-growth markets like India,” said Mr Steve Lucas, VP and GM, database and technology, SAP.

According to SAP officials, Maharashtra State Electricity Distribution Co (MSED), Abhijeet Power Ltd, Bhavnagar Energy Company, Sanghvi Foods, Usha and Asian Paints are some of its customers who are in the process of adapting HANA.

Interestingly, the company said that some of these customers have shifted from using Oracle.

“We are able to run our internal reports faster and can use data to make informed decisions in our go-to market strategies,” said Mr Subodh Dubey, Group CIO at Usha. The total cost of ownership of SAP solutions are lower than that of Oracle, SAP executives said.

The company plans to grow its R&D centre in India but did not give out details on its hiring plans.

According to Gartner, the enterprise software market in India is projected to grow 13 per cent in 2012, with revenues of $3.22 billion. By 2016, India's share of the software market in Asia/Pacific is expected to reach 12.1 per cent, representing $5.4 billion in revenue, or 1.5 per cent of total worldwide software market revenue of $361 billion.

Source:

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/industry-and-economy/info-tech/article3470062.ece?homepage=true&ref=wl_home

SAP Bids to Become “Facebook of Enterprise”

2012-06-01T02:04:00.000+05:30

When enterprise employees connect, the businesslike LinkedIn is the obvious forum for social activity. In reality, however, Facebook is the most popular platform even though it is not really geared for business, which makes it vulnerable to a more effective competitor.

In an interview with ReadWriteWeb, SAP’s vice president for cloud marketing, Dinesh Sharma, postulates the intriguing idea that his company through the cloud could be the one to grab the enterprise social function. The strategy is based on two main factors.

The first is SAP’s HANA which shifts processing into memory, massively accelerating the way multiple data sources can be queried. The other is SuccessFactors, acquired last December, which organizes peoples’ career portfolios online.

Picture if you will a talent management worker in the human resources department of a major enterprise. On her tablet is a tool that would let her search for multiple people throughout the workforce who would be best suited to work together as a team on a collective project, sorted in order by their estimated availability and proximity to the place of business. The tool would have to judge these workers’ interest and attitudes based on such factors as what they tweet, what products they’ve liked on Facebook and what tech news stories they’ve commented on. Even with the best database management schemes in the world, it would be quite a considerable query, consuming tremendous resources and time.

HANA, however, could cope claims Mr. Sharma.

SAP’s Sharma points out that the common usage model for applications preferred by folks in college or emerging from it today is tremendously different from the usage model of 2000—the key difference being the social component. Any new functionality delivered to that customer—the ones entering the workforce with the skills that talent managers want most—must be geared toward interoperability and shareability. It cannot sit on a hard drive.

Source: WSJ

http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2012/05/30/sap-bids-to-become-facebook-of-enterprise/?mod=google_news_blog

India fastest growing market for SAP, aspires for No. 2 position

2012-06-01T01:41:00.000+05:30

India has become the fastest growing market for global application software leader SAP. The firm bets on its India business to drive momentum of its traditional as well as newer offerings.

SAP’s Asia Pacific/Japan business grew 19 per cent year-on-year to €123 million (non-IFRS software revenue) for the first quarter of 2012. The quarter was the best Q1 the company has ever seen in APJ and is its ninth consecutive quarter of double-digit growth.

“India is also an early adopter of our new offerings including real-time data analysis system HANA. We are seeing double-digit growth across segments driven by our mobility and database businesses,” said Peter Gartenberg, MD of SAP India.

“With the acquisition of Business Objects and Sybase, we are now a serious contender in the database business. SAP aspires to be the No. 2 database vendor in the country. Recent customers in India running the SAP ERP applications have also opted for our technologies to transact, move, store, process and analyse data in real time. Those that have joined this trend include Bhavnagar Energy, Industrial Mineral Comp, Jeans Kit and Sanghvi Foods,” he added.

The firm is betting on its HANA offering to make inroads into the database market. The solution offers real-time data processing and reduces complexity of information management.

Source:
http://www.mydigitalfc.com/companies/india-fastest-growing-market-sap-aspires-no-2-position-898

Deloitte Launches Analytics Center of Excellence in Support of SAP HANA®

2012-06-01T01:12:00.003+05:30

NEW YORK, May 3, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- To meet the growing demand for support around the SAP HANA® platform, Deloitte has launched an Analytics Center of Excellence. The new center is based inHyderabad, India.

The Center of Excellence will benefit Deloitte's clients by providing the latest and most up-to-datestrategies for supporting the deployment of SAP HANA within their enterprise. In addition, they will receive a prototyping capability to test their deployment decisions and will have access to experienced professionals who can efficiently turn their requirements into actionable solutions.

"We have seen a surge of interest in SAP HANA among our clients," says Lee Dittmar, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP and U.S. leader & global champion of Deloitte's Analytics program. "The demand is comprehensible, as the enterprise-scale, in-memory database offering represents a significant development in business technology, in light of the increased focus on improving analytics and the exponential growth of mobility. The Center of Excellence will help us develop and deploy SAPHANA-based analytics services and solutions around the world."

Deloitte professionals who have received extensive hands-on training on SAP HANA and other proprietary and commercial analytics offerings, will staff the Center and support related initiatives globally.

"The launch of this new Deloitte Center of Excellence, in support of SAP HANA, underscores Deloitte's commitment to the SAP relationship and helping meet customer needs," said Christian Rodatus, senior vice president, Global SAP HANA Sales, SAP. "The center will help our joint customers, regardless of geographic location, envision new ways of running their businesses in real time, making it possible to accelerate innovation."

About Deloitte's Practice for SAP Solutions

Deloitte's SAP practice includes a global network of more than 9,600 dedicated practitioners in more than 135 countries. Through its in-depth knowledge in SAP technology combined with broad functional capabilities, Deloitte focuses on driving business value for its clients through advisory, implementation, and analytics. These capabilities impact the heart of the business, providing specific insights that result in better business decisions. Click here to learn more.

As used in this document, "Deloitte" means Deloitte Consulting LLP. Please seewww.deloitte.com/us/about for a detailed description of the legal structure of Deloitte LLP and its subsidiaries. All services are provided within the rules and regulations applicable to the practice of public accounting.

SAP, SAP HANA and all SAP logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germanyand in several other countries.

All other product and service names mentioned are the trademarks of their respective companies.

Source:http://www.moneylife.in/prnews/deloitte-launches-analytics-center-of-excellence-in-support-of-sap-hana%C2%AE/201205030930PR_NEWS_USPR_____NY00314.html

Tata Consultancy Services gets Partner Impact Awards Presented at SAP Field Kick-Off Meeting

2012-06-01T01:10:00.004+05:30

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), (BSE: 532540, NSE: TCS), a leading IT services, consulting and business solutions organization, announced that it has received Partner Impact Awards from SAP (NYSE: SAP) for superior SAP HANA sales performance and SAP practice expansion. The awards were presented during the SAP® Asia Pacific Japan (APJ) Kick-Off Meeting (FKOM) 2012, held recently in Singapore to the top-performing SAP channel partners and SAP services partners in the APJ region for outstanding contributions that impact overall SAP sales and pipeline-generation goals.

As the recipient of the SAP HANA Impact Award, TCS was honored for sales performance in revenue. The Commitment to Quality Impact Award, for SAP practice expansion, was awarded to TCS based on the number of consultants ramped up, trained and certified for the SAP environment in 2011.

A steering committee comprised regional and global SAP representatives determined winning partners in each category according to numerous criteria such as sales achievement and performance. TCS received the award during the SAP APJ FKOM 2012, an annual gathering of SAP executives, SAP field employees and partners to learn about SAP's strategy, sales methodology, best practices, business growth opportunities and product innovations. The theme of this year's meeting, "Run Better Win Bigger," prominently featured SAP's innovation story focusing on its core pillars – analytics, cloud, mobility and in-memory computing – as well as solutions for industries and lines of business on a consistent core.

"Our partners' regional, industry and solution expertise play a crucial role in driving game-changing co-innovation and expanding our market reach and customer touch points," said Bronwyn Hastings, senior vice president, Ecosystem & Channels, SAP APJ. "As a recipient of two 2012 SAP Partner Impact awards, we recognize TCS's commitment and efforts in developing and growing its partnership with SAP and driving customer success."

"We are pleased to see these results from our major investments in business transformation capabilities as well as the solutions we build around SAP HANA, Mobility and Analytics applications," said Raman Venkatraman, Global Head, SAP Practice, TCS. "In conjunction with SAP, TCS is well positioned to provide joint customers with integrated, synchronized, and connected enterprise solutions that meet current business and IT demands."

SAP and all SAP logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and in several other countries all over the world.

Business Objects, BusinessObjects and the Business Objects logo are trademarks or registeredtrademarks of Business Objects in the United States and/or other countries. Business Objects is an SAP company.

All other product and service names mentioned are the trademarks of their respective companies.

SAP Forward-looking Statement

Any statements contained in this document that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements as defined in the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Words such as "anticipate," "believe," "estimate," "expect," "forecast," "intend," "may," "plan," "project," "predict," "should" and "will" and similar expressions as they relate to SAP are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. SAP undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations The factors that could affect SAP's future financial results are discussed more fully in SAP's filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"), including SAP's most recent Annual Report on Form 20-F filed with the SEC. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of their dates.

About Tata Consultancy Services Ltd (TCS)

Tata Consultancy Services is an IT services, consulting and business solutions organization that delivers real results to global business, ensuring a level of certainty no other firm can match. TCS offers a consulting-led, integrated portfolio of IT, BPO, infrastructure, engineering and assurance services. This is delivered through its unique Global Network Delivery Model™, recognized as the benchmark of excellence in software development. A part of the Tata Group, India's largest industrial conglomerate, TCS has over 238,583 of the world's best trained consultants in 42 countries. The Company generated consolidated revenues of US $ 10.17 billion for year ended 31 March, 2012 and is listed on the National Stock Exchange and Bombay Stock Exchange in India. For more information, visit us at www.tcs.com

SOURCE:

http://www.moneylife.in/prnews/tata-consultancy-services-gets-partner-impact-awards-presented-at-sap-field-kick-off-meeting/201205140930PR_NEWS_USPR_____LA05825.html

India has a hand in all SAP innovations

2012-06-01T01:02:00.000+05:30

India is a market that has enormous choices when it comes to the cloud, believes Bill McDermott, co-CEO , SAP AG. "You have a hybrid environment where you could have a private could or you could bring innovation in to a public cloud. So what we want to do is give customers a choice and India is a market that likes choice," he said, while elaborating on SAP's initiatives in the cloud in India . He also said that India contributes in a big way to all innovations in SAP.
McDermott was speaking in an exclusive interview to TOI at the company's annual global business technology event, Sapphire Now, in Orlando,Florida. Excerpts:

What is your emerging market strategy?

I believe the emerging markets have emerged. In India where we have huge development centers and are doing lots of innovation, we are expanding with the ecosystem partners and creating a great business network. What we are doing today is capitalising on our great brand, the breadth and depth of our customer installed base and the net new customers we are gaining in the mature ones, while planting the seeds and building strong large workforces in business networks in the ' emerging markets' .

SAP has one of its biggest R&D units in India. What are some of the major products/ solutions that have come out of these labs?

The way we kind of develop is that we rapidly deploy assets around the world in different developments centers at different times. So India has got a hand in all the new innovations. India has a hand in mobility, a hand in HANA, there is obviously a hand in cloud because lots of things that we are doing now by Business By Design is an example of products/solutions being done in India.

What are SAP's initiatives in the cloud, in India?

Business By Design for mid-size enterprises and for subsidiaries of big companies -- that's available in India in the cloud. Business One solutions in the cloud is also available in India. Then you have a hybrid environment where you could have a private could or you could bring innovation in to a public cloud. So what we want to do is give customers a choice and India is a market that likes choice.

Organisations, particularly in India, remain wary of moving business-critical applications like ERP to the cloud. How are you addressing that?

If a customer doesn't have the incentive or the desire to move an ERP instillation to the cloud, then they shouldn't . But there is some economics that they may be able to gain by moving their installed base into let's say a private cloud, where they can virtualise the hardware and can create some economies of scale with what they have already invested in.

How much more affordable would the cloud solutions be, compared to traditional licensed products?

Overall cloud is not necessarily always cheaper - especially in the long term. With cloud the big advantage is the ease of consumption. The problem with cost has never been the license itself, it's been on the implementation. The big idea is to take hardware out of the equation, take unnecessary services out of the equation and run your business in a far more lean manner .

How is HANA (your in-memory computing solution) doing in India? And what potential does it have in the Indian market considering the volume game is in the SME space?

If there is a market that's more opportune for big data or HANA than India I haven't seen it yet. We think that we can move big data into HANA into main memory and completely change the game. It would be at a different cost model, a different speed model, and a different service model. So the first thing we have to do is change people's minds that HANA is real and it can change the game. This year we plan on having a couple of thousand customers up and running on HANA. India would certainly have its fair share percentage of that I'm saying: if we are going to do a couple o thousand installs around the world, I think India alone could have 2,000 HANAs.

Mobility is a big focus for everyone. What steps have SAP taken to make its solutions accessible on mobile devices in India?

I think there is plenty of room and I'm not completely convinced that India has gotten the memo that SAP is the number one mobile business software company in the world What's fascinating about the Indian market is even if the market were growing at a rate of 10,000% year-on-year , that wouldn't even keep up with true market potential. That's how big the mobile market is in India.

It's been two and a half years since SAP put in place a co-CEO model. Can you share your experience and is this model sustainable? Some Indian companies have experimented with the model but have met with no success.

There are a couple of reason why it works well at SAP. One is we have had a culture of co CEOs since the founding of the company. We respect the idea of balance of power. It's healthy. Jim Hagemann Snabe, my fellow co CEO, focuses more on the technology side while I focus more on the customer and market side. Not that the domains are exclusive it's just that it's our priority areas. Besides we are in two different continents, which means we are covering more area for the company. Finally as it relates to vision and strat egy of the company we are completely aligned and we have a passion for this company. I think the fun of it comes from the trust and the fact that we really think that two is better than one. Two hands are better than one, two feet are better than one, two sets of eyes are bet ter than one.

Source: TOI

http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-05-22/services-apps/31815603_1_public-cloud-hybrid-environment-mid-size-enterprises

SAP to buy Ariba, boosts cloud bet

2012-06-01T00:54:00.002+05:30

(Reuters) - Top European software company SAP AG plans to buy Ariba Inc in a deal valuing the business and commerce network company at $4.3 billion, its latest maneuver against Oracle in the fast-growing Internet-based computing market.

SAP is taking aim at Oracle, the world's No. 2 maker of business management software, as they vie with Salesforce.com Inc in the multibillion dollar cloud-computing services market, one of the industry's hottest area of growth.

Shares in Ariba, which were halted briefly, leapt 20 percent to SAP's offer price of about $45 per share.

"This deal puts them more on the radar screen and gives them another big customer base they can sell additional services into. These are not inexpensive moves but it signals they are really tilting more toward the cloud," said Evercore analyst Kirk Materne.

SAP's announcement comes just weeks before Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is due to announce the Silicon Valley company's latest cloud software strategy, on June 6.

The $45-per-share offer for Ariba, a darling of the first dotcom boom that has since reinvented itself as a major networking and online commerce software developer, values Ariba at 6.9 times expected 2013 revenue, according to Roth Capital Partners.

Salesforce.com trades around 5.5 times expected revenue.

The purchase of Sunnyvale, California-based Ariba would be the latest in a string of acquisitions by German technology company SAP to help fuel its revenue growth and expand its cloud computing business.

SAP said it expected the deal, already approved by Ariba's board, to close in the third quarter.

But Cross Research analyst Richard Williams said that since many of Ariba's customers use Oracle services, there is good reason -- and precedence -- to expect the U.S.-based Oracle to make a rival bid.

In 2005, Oracle snatched retail software maker Retek away from SAP after a bidding war that reached $630 million.

"Strategically it's a valuable asset and would disadvantage Oracle if SAP were to close the deal, so I can see a case for why Oracle would feel the need to enter into the bidding to protect its own potential growth opportunities," Williams said.

SHARES HALTED

Cloud computing refers to providing software, storage, computing power and other services to customers from remote data centers over the Web.

Oracle and SAP are locking horns as both transform themselves into major players in the cloud and reduce their reliance on traditional business software. SAP's purchase of Web-based software company SuccessFactors Inc, announced late last year, was seen as accelerating their running battle.

In February, Oracle increased its bet on cloud computing by agreeing to purchase Taleo Corp, a maker of Web-based software for recruiting employees, for about $1.9 billion.

SAP's deal puts Ariba's enterprise value at about $4.3 billion. Enterprise value is market capitalization plus debt and other considerations.

Demand for cloud-based software is rising rapidly because the approach allows companies to start using new programs faster and at lower cost than traditional products that are installed at a customer's own data center.

SAP intends to integrate Ariba into Hana, a business intelligence tool to help companies analyze large quantities of data quickly. Hana came to market last year and generated 160 million euros in sales through the end of 2011, surpassing SAP's own expectations of 100 million euros.

"We are looking forward to optimizing Ariba so it can be used in real-time. This is a new category of the cloud. We want to accelerate the platform for collaboration between companies," SAP co-chief executive Jim Hagemann Snabe said on a conference call.

SAP said its transaction would be funded from its free cash and a 2.4 billion euro ($3.06 billion) term loan facility.

The European company also said it would consolidate its cloud-based supplier assets under Ariba, which would continue to operate as an independent business.

Ariba shares closed up 19.2 percent to $44.87 on Nasdaq on Tuesday, suggesting investors expect the deal to be completed around that price. ($1 = 0.7838 euros)

Source: Reuters

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/25/net-us-ariba-sap-idUSBRE84O05S20120525

SAP Builds Ecosystem To Boost Hana

2012-06-01T00:53:00.000+05:30

SAP forges closer ties with Intel, IBM, analytics vendors, and systems integrators to jump start its in-memory database.

If SAP's Hana in-memory database is to succeed, SAP will need more than just a product to win over customers. That's why the company highlighted a bevy of partnerships at this week's SAPPHIRE event in Orlando, Fla., including closer ties with hardware, software, and services firms.

On the hardware front, SAP announced on Wednesday that it has taken its 15-year-old partnership with Intel a level deeper with jointly developed support and optimization for scale-out, multi-node deployments of Hana on Intel servers. Scale-out architecture will enable customers to handle multi-terabyte data sets by adding more servers.

SAP and Intel announced that they themselves have brought the architecture to the extreme with a 100-terabyte system running on Intel Xeon E7 servers that will serve as the foundation of what they described as a petabyte-scale cloud platform.

"With a farm of such systems around the world, we believe that we can run every single ERP system that we have today," said SAP CTO Vishal Sikka during his keynote presentation on Wednesday.

f customers want to keep their deployments on-premises but run them on Hana, they'll need new hardware, specifically Intel X86-based servers. Sikka noted that Hana-certified servers are now offered by more than half of the server manufacturers that use Intel processors, including Cisco, Fujitsu, HP, and IBM. Sikka and SAP chairman Hasso Plattner singled out IBM, in particular, for close cooperation in offering Hana-ready hardware--perhaps easing the pain of DB2 licenses displaced by SAP's new database.

The option to scale out opens the door to big-data analytic processing, and on that front SAP also announced the released Service Pack 4 for Hana, which introduces text searching on unstructured and structured data, interoperability with the R open-source statistical language, and in-database predictive and statistical-analysis functions.

The Service Pack 4 announcement might satisfy critics such as Wells Fargo software analyst Jason Maynard, who wrote in an April research note that "SAP should be targeting new areas where Hana's in-memory technology has a real advantage, rather than trying to replace existing relational database workloads."

Wells Fargo downgraded SAP's stock to "market perform" from "outperform" late last month in part because Maynard doesn't see infrastructure (meaning databases) as SAP's strength. He wants to see more big-data apps built on Hana.

Opera Solutions, one of many software vendors partnering with SAP on Hana, announced this week that it's now running its Signal Hub analytic applications on Hana. Signal Hubs tap into large and varied data sets to perform predictive analyses and support decisions on areas such as marketing, spend management, and credit risk. During his keynote, Sikka said Morgan Stanley is a joint customer where Opera has been delivering predictive investment advice using its machine-learning techniques.

"This process used to run on traditional infrastructure, but with Hana it will become dramatically more real-time while also integrating historical trading information," Sikka said.

SAP is turning to systems integrators for help in selling and implementing Hana, and on that front the vendor announced that Accenture is expanding its SAP practice to promote SAP's database offerings and particularly Hana. Accenture has committed to adding 1,000 new employees skilled in SAP databases and related applications by the end of 2012, and it also will develop a dedicated research and development capability around Hana.

"We're seeing the uptake [of Hana] with customers, so we're doubling down on our investment and we already have a development factory for SAP BW on Hana up and running in our India delivery center," Mark Willford, global managing director of SAP Business at Accenture, told InformationWeek.

On the development front, Sikka got a hearty round of applause during his keynote when he announced that SAP is making Hana developer licenses available for free. The company also is opening up access to the platform by making developer instances of Hana available on Amazon Web Services. Enterprise applications and SAP expert Dennis Howlett wrote that the moves "put all developers large, small and anywhere in between onto a level playing field."

Source: InformationWeek USA

2012-06-01T00:48:00.002+05:30

Essar plans to roll out SAP HANA across the organization in phases over the next 12 to 18 months

Cisco today announced that the Essar Group has deployed Cisco UCS to support the implementation of SAP HANA (High Performance Analytic Appliance). Optimized on the Cisco UCS platform, HANA -- along with SAP BusinessObjects BI solutions -- brings all of the data within the reach of decision makers in seconds, helps enable innovative new applications, and combines high-volume transactions with analytics.

“We expect in-memory computing to be a game-changer and were looking for a server platform designed to achieve high availability and performance. The Cisco Unified Computing System, which is based on industry standards, has met our expectations and we believe that it serves as an ideal server platform for enterprise-critical applications like SAP HANA. With Cisco UCS, we are confident of achieving our ROI from our investment in SAP software,” said N Jayantha Prabhu, CTO, Essar Group.

With Cisco UCS as the preferred infrastructure choice, Essar plans to roll out SAP HANA across the organization in phases over the next 12 to 18 months. SAP solutions combined with the Cisco UCS provide significant value through standards-based, high-performance unified fabric, improved memory capacity, reduced power consumption and lower total cost of ownership.

By building on the benefits of the Cisco UCS platform, Essar will now enjoy quick access to data/information - without the delay of typical enterprise data warehouses.

“SAP HANA optimized on Cisco UCS, enables faster decision making and is fast becoming the platform of choice for deployment by a number of large enterprises, specifically in telecom, manufacturing, BFSI, IT/ITeS and energy verticals,” said Avinash Purwar, Senior VP, Cisco India and SAARC.

Source: InformationWeek USA

SAP eyes second slot IT database management biz in India

2012-06-01T00:26:00.000+05:30

NEW DELHI: Buoyed by growth trends in the last year, global IT firm SAP expects to become the second-largest player in the IT database management business in the country in coming years. "We acquired 20 new clients in the first quarter (ended march 31, 2012).

From the growth trends that we are seeing, we expect to be No 2 in database business," SAP India Managing Director Peter Gartenberg told reporters here. The company is relatively new in the database management business but expects to catch up fast with its competition, specially in India. "India is among top 4-5 markets where we have to win ... the impact that India has on global market and technology ... we cannot afford to lose," SAP's Global Executive Vice-President Steve Lucas said.

The company is the world's fourthlargest player after Oracle, IBM and Microsoft in database business. "We started last year and today, we have 1 billion in revenue (from HANA) and 3,000 customers evaluating HANA (SAP's data analysis solution) globally; 400 have purchased and around 100 have deployed it. I won't be surprise if we cross 2 billion (worth of) business by end of this financial year," Lucas said.

SAP IT solutions include software which can inform companies or their retailers about customers probable shopping requirement by analysing his previous data available with them and thus provide opportunity to increase their sales.

The company, which provides IT solutions for businesses, said it has seen Indian companies among early users of its modern database solution. Lucas added that SAP has 170,000 customers globally. SAP expects these customers to adopt its database IT solution as well.

In India, SAP is estimated to lead in IT resource management software for companies with 47.2% market share. In other related IT solution, SAP is estimated to have 27% market share in IT business intelligence solutions and a 36% in IT solutions for supply chain management.

"India will be the first country where we will launch training programme and courses to work on HANA," Lucas said.

Source: TOI

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/enterprise-it/services-apps/SAP-eyes-second-slot-IT-database-management-biz-in-India/articleshow/13674942.cms