SAP Empowers Intelligent Enterprises With New Data-driven Cloud Services

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By STS News Desk On Oct 8, 2019

SAP Empowers Intelligent Enterprises With New Data-driven Cloud Services

SAP SE announced enhancements to its business technology platform to enable intelligent enterprises to thrive in an Experience Economy. These updates help customers quickly turn data into business value. The announcements were made at the SAP TechEd conference being held October 8–10, 2019, in Barcelona, Spain.

“Our business technology platform brings SAP HANA and analytics closer together with SAP Cloud Platform so users can make smarter, faster and more-confident business decisions,” said Juergen Mueller, SAP chief technology officer and member of the Executive Board. “SAP ensures high levels of openness and flexibility including out-of-the-box integration, modularity and ease of extension in cloud, on-premise and hybrid deployment models. With this open and flexible approach, SAP is committed to helping our customers achieve superior business outcomes.”

By bringing together SAP technology into one “stack” with a single reference architecture, the business technology platform from SAP delivers required services for modern enterprises. It encompasses database and data management, application development and integration, analytics, intelligent technologies and services to help organizations extend their SAP applications, integrate their landscape and build new applications to improve business processes. With the business technology platform customers can benefit from easy access to SAP data and out-of-the-box business content that helps turn data into business value. Additionally, partnerships with hyperscale vendors and seamless interoperability with their technologies deliver a high level of scalability and flexibility.

SAP HANA® Cloud Services to Infuse Intelligence into Data

Comprising SAP Data Warehouse Cloud solution, SAP HANA® Cloud and SAP Analytics Cloud, SAP HANA Cloud Services combines all data and analytics capabilities in these solutions as one set of interconnected services to store, process, govern and consume large volumes of data.

SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, a business-ready data warehouse in the cloud, offers users a self-service solution to easily and quickly tie all their business data together and translate it into value for their specific line of business. With a simple and flexible pricing model, customers can avoid the high up-front investment costs of a traditional data warehouse and easily and cost-effectively scale their data warehouse as data demands continue to grow. SAP Data Warehouse Cloud can be deployed either stand-alone or as an extension to customers’ existing on-premise SAP BW/4HANA® solution or SAP HANA software. More than 2,000 customers are registered for the beta program for SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, and general availability is planned for Q4/2019.

“Now, our people are even more efficient thanks to SAP Data Warehouse Cloud,” said Stefan Fruehauf, PwC Partner and Global Leadership team member. “Connecting all this data from around the world has had an enormous impact on our business users.”

“SAP Data Warehouse Cloud gave us all the tools to create a single data landscape,” said Andreas Foerger, manager of the Analytics and Reporting team at Randstad Germany. “We were able to combine cloud and on-premise data with internal and external sources. Thanks to the data virtualization capabilities, we can connect all our data without creating redundancies. The semantic layer that SAP Data Warehouse Cloud comes with helps us sync all our data from different sources in a way that makes perfect sense to the business.”

“With SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, we now have a tool at hand that goes far beyond the modeling capabilities of a BI tool,” said Andreas Madsen, senior data and analytics partner at VELUX. “We can give our business users flexibility, but also make sure that we govern and protect the data. Our business users are empowered. They can easily get the important information they need when they need it. This solution bridges the gap not only between the on-premise and the cloud world but also between IT and business. Everyone is operating more efficiently.”

SAP HANA Cloudis natively built for the cloud to bring customers the simplicity and speed of SAP HANA for all their data. It offers one virtual interactive access layer across all data sources with a scalable query engine, decoupling data consumption from data management. Users are equipped with a simplified, unified data access layer to streamline data processing while consolidating and harmonizing data integration in their intelligent applications. SAP HANA Cloud can be deployed either as a stand-alone solution or as an extension to customers’ existing on-premise environments, allowing them to benefit from the cloud and the ability of SAP HANA to analyze live, transactional data. General availability for SAP HANA Cloud is planned for Q4/2019.

The latest release of SAP Analytics Cloud was announced at SAP TechEd Las Vegas and includes enhancements for enterprise planning. These updates enable business users to automate typical planning processes using new tools such as a wizard that simplifies the creation of planning workflows by automatically creating calendar tasks for planning process contributors. The new “builder tool” creates different versions of rolling forecasts. Improved “data actions” include prompts and variables to cover the same calculations across plans to help save time by maintaining a single, complex calculation rather than managing multiple versions. Additionally, SAP Analytics Cloud is planned to be embedded in SAP SuccessFactors solutions as well as SAP S/4HANA and made available in Q4/2019, giving companies better insight into their HR and business data to improve people and organizational decisions. Get more information here.

“SAP Analytics Cloud is increasing the efficiency of our planning cycles by 40 percent to 60 percent by spending less time gathering and preparing data,” said Richard Masci, head, Financial Systems, Airbus Americas Inc. “This is a huge savings for us.”

To further help developers, the embedded edition of SAP Analytics Cloud is planned to be offered as a service under the SAP Cloud Platform Enterprise Agreement. Developers can easily activate this analytics service to quickly build and integrate analytics into their applications through live connectivity with SAP HANA.

Latest Major Release of Leading On-Premise Business Intelligence Suite

SAP recognizes that every customer’s journey to the cloud is unique and many organizations are operating in a mixed landscape with on-premise, cloud and hybrid deployments. The 4.3 release of the SAP BusinessObjects™ Business Intelligence suite aims to support customers with on-premise enhancements while providing tighter integration with SAP Analytics Cloud. Benefits of the new version include an improved user experience, enhanced ease of deployment and support for the latest industry standards.