SAP Rolls Towards Cloud Data Intelligence

Our enterprise was and is an SAP user, we worked with them primarily on optimization analytics applications.

HANA in the Cloud by Christmas, SAP Says,   Alex Woodie in DataNami

SAP formally revealed the planned general availability of hotly anticipated new cloud data storage products during CTO Juergen Mueller’s keynote address at TechEd conference in Barcelona Monday. Two of those new offerings — SAP HANA Cloud and SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, which are bundled under the SAP HANA Cloud Services umbrella — were announced earlier this year and are expected to ship “before Christmas,” Mueller said.

SAP HANA Cloud is a new cloud-native version of the core HANA database that is delivered as a container and can be managed on the SAP Cloud platform using the Kubernetes resource manager. According to Mueller, SAP HANA Cloud gives customers a single place to store data from a variety of sources — for analytics and transaction processing — and manage it in a variety of ways.

“SAP HANA Cloud offers one data access layer for all your data sources,” he said. “It directly connects to your data from your on-premise HANA system, your third-party systems, and even Excel, without the need for data replication in order to work with that data.”

The new cloud offering is a fully managed cloud service, and will “dramatically lower” customers’ total cost of ownership (TCO) for storing and managing petabytes worth of data, Mueller said.

“We have choices for data storage and more options for data federation, so you don’t have to move your data around anymore, so the CFO will be happy,” Mueller said. “You only pay for the memory, disk, and data lake storage that you use — paid by the hour, if you wish.”

SAP HANA Cloud includes a data tiering functions that let customers mix and match their data to different underlying storage mediums supported by HANA. It’s all about meeting the changing data storage and management needs of customers, Mueller said.  .... "

SAP Acquires Qualtrics

Long time user of SAP in our enterprise.  Note the $8 Billion cost, seems quite steep.  I see them as a Customer Feedback Platform, see also here for comparison to other players.  In things of the complexity of SAP it is all about the customer experience, and especially as new tech is blended in.

 SAP Aquiries Qualtrics, Propel It Forward In The AOC?

By Faith Adams, Analyst,    Forrester

Yesterday, SAP announced that it is acquiring Qualtrics for a hefty $8 billion in cash.  https://www.qualtrics.com/

For SAP, this does make some sense. SAP is often perceived as being a legacy provider that struggles to play in the consumer space, and this acquisition may be able to help it make a larger data play. It may also enable SAP to close the loop when it comes to some of the VoC gaps in its C/4HANA CX suite that was announced earlier this year. But all of this is to be determined.  ... " 

Amazon Echo and SAP HANA

A rare business oriented use of otherwise consumer oriented virtual assistants.   Examining.

Amazon Echo and the SAP HANA Cloud Platform     by Craig Cmehil

" ...For awhile now I’ve explored possibilities with the Amazon Echo and SAP HANA, and over time I’ve received a lot of requests on how to do that or how to do that. Therefore I decided to put together a little blog here to describe the “how” of some of the demos I have done and how you can do it using SAP HANA for free inside the SAP HANA Cloud Platform trial system. ... " 

SAP and Accenture Analytics

How SAP and Accenture work together to provide analytical services.   Their overview site.

SAP HANA and Amazon Echo

Have always been interested in how there might be practical business uses of voice driven assistant systems.  I am sure there are examinations occuring in industry to test the idea.  I happened on this post in the SAP blog, regarding how to link Alexa to the  SAP HANA Cloud Platform, and securing its use.   Technical.   Just an exploration, it seems, but a starting point.  Voice interaction can be an efficient channel for assistance.  Note though that a voice driven system is fundamentally insecure.

" ... In this blog I would like to discuss some aspects concerning securing an Amazon Echo device using the Alexa voice service and SAP HCP.

Let me set the scene – you are creating a voice interface using an Amazon Echo device.  For now you want the sales team to use the Echo device to retrieve customer information from Hybris C4C, maybe list customers and then get some internal order (budget/expense) information from SAP S/4Hana. ... " 

SAP Testing Data Viz at Superbowl

In InformationWeek:  SAP Uses Super Bowl 50 To Test Data Visualization, UX ... SAP's Fan Energy Zone in San Francisco's Super Bowl 50 celebrations is a giant test case in how users create, share, and process data in real-time. ....  "

SAP Does Analytics Cloud

It seems to be the week for new analytics offerings.   A Software as a Service offering.  Implications of some embedded intelligence, which makes sense since SAP has always delivered some domain  tailored capabilities.

SAP launches souped-up, cloud-based analytics solution
AP SE is getting into the Big Data analytics-on-cloud game with the launch of a new service, SAP Cloud for Analytics that’s able to digest data from multiple stores both on-premise and in the cloud.
Nic Smith, SAP senior marketing director for analytics, told CRN.com that SAP Cloud for Analytics is built natively on the company’s HANA Cloud Platform, and that it can operate as a standalone business analytics tool or in tandem with other SAP apps.

“This is an entirely new Software-as-a-Service solution that we think is going to redefine analytics,” Smith enthused. “This is built from the user-experience perspective [and] will lead to new analytic applications. ... "