SAP Unveils SAP HANA 2, Ignites Digital Transformation

SAP SE has announced to launch the enhanced and tweaked version of its affluent SAP HANA. Rolling out the new SAP HANA 2 platform is sought to include and extend the proven technology from SAP’s breakthrough in-memory computing platform to redefine the digital transformation. Planned to hit the market on November 30, 2016, the new SAP HANA microservices are available by subscription through the SAP Hybris as a Service (informally referred to as “YaaS”) marketplace.

Announcing amid its SAP TechEd Barcelona, Nov. 8–10, the express edition of SAP HANA 2 will be available for delivery shortly after general availability to help organizations jump-start new development projects.  To collar the dynamic changing IT environment, the German Software giant will technologically enhance the new platform twice a year.

Becoming the helping hand to the agile IT environments, the platform will include the below features and enhancements:

• Database management – IT organizations will be able to provide business continuity with enhanced high availability, security, workload management and administration enhancements. For example, the new active/active read-enabled option enables IT organizations to leverage secondary systems – previously used only for system replication – to off-load read-intensive workloads for improved operations.
• Data management – Businesses are expected to leverage data, regardless of where it resides, with enhancements to enterprise modeling, data integration, data quality and tiered storage. A new edition of the SAP Enterprise Architecture Designer Web application that works with and is powered by SAP HANA allows IT organizations to manage complex information architectures and visualize the potential impact of new technologies before they are implemented.
• Analytical intelligence – Developers are embedding rich insight into applications with enhanced analytical processing engines for text, spatial, graph and streaming data. For example, new algorithms for classification, association, time series and regression have been added to the predictive analytics library to empower data scientists to discover new patterns and incorporate machine learning into custom applications.
• Application development – Developers are expected to build and deploy next-generation applications with enhanced functions for application servers, development tools and languages. For example, bring-your-own-language support provides a choice of additional third-party build packs and runtimes that can be used within SAP HANA extended application services, advanced model. Also, a new file processor API enables developers to extract text and metadata from documents to deliver deeper insights.

Citing on the new rollout, Bernd Leukert, member of the executive board, Products and Innovation, SAP SE, said, “SAP pioneered in-memory computing with the launch of SAP HANA in 2010 and throughout our journey we have driven breakthrough innovation on a highly stable core data platform for our customers. The release of SAP HANA 2 marks a milestone in the industry, as it represents the next generation of SAP HANA that will propel customers toward a successful and prosperous digital future.”

New SAP HANA Microservices in the Cloud

Users of cloud-based microservices powered by SAP HANA can enhance applications with analytical insight using simple APIs and any language or development platform.

The new SAP HANA services in the cloud include:

• Text Analysis Entity Extraction, Text Analysis Fact Extraction and Text Analysis Linguistic Analysis: Use text data processing features in the cloud for application enhancement with natural language processing.
• Earth Observation Analysis service (beta): Co-innovated with European Space Agency (ESA) and based on the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) EO-WCS standard, this microservice accesses satellite data from ESA and uses SAP HANA, spatial edition, to perform spatial processing in the cloud. The new service in conjunction with Munich RE, is claimed to deliver historic information about vegetation, water, soil and other spectral indexes in real time.

“SAP HANA 2 represents a continuation of technology innovation by SAP, designed to enable organizations to address the fast-changing aspects of digital business,” said Carl Olofson, research vice president, IDC. “SAP HANA 2 features new and enhanced functions that can enhance data management and accelerate application development for digital transformation. In addition, new SAP HANA microservices in the cloud, accessible through SAP Hybris as a Service, are expected to increase innovation of insight-driven applications to deliver competitive advantage for SAP customers.”