China's Largest Bottled Water Producer Joins Growing Number of SAP Customers Achieving Dramatic Results on SAP HANA™ Platform

LAS VEGAS, Sept. 13, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced that Nongfu Spring Co., Ltd., the largest  producer of bottled water in China, has deployed the SAP HANA™ platform to solve its big data challenges. On August 20, 2011, Nongfu Spring successfully went live on the largest customer implementation of SAP HANA in China. The company joins the growing list of customers that have recently purchased or are in the process of implementing SAP HANA. The announcement was made at SAP® TechEd 2011, being held in Las Vegas, Nevada, from September 12-16, where attendees can hear more about successful customer use cases with SAP in-memory computing technology.

As the largest subsidiary of Yangshengtang Company, which has assets of about CNY10 billion, Nongfu Spring has seven production bases and dozens of factories. Achieving real-time visibility into data was critical for the company to grow and to improve efficiency and reduce costs. For example, due to the large data volume produced, it took more than a day for Nongfu Spring to work with its point-of-sales and channel sales data to display business insights and take action. Executives realized that they would gain significant advantages from having a real-time view into the business, so they looked for a solution that would reduce data latency and improve data query and business logic processing speed.

"SAP HANA is a comprehensive and sophisticated in-memory database platform that outperformed on our existing data mart solution based on Oracle," said Patrick Hoo, CIO, Nongfu Spring. "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 synchronization. For example, we found that the same script in the SAP HANA studio was returning results 200 to 300 times faster than the same script in PL/SQL in Oracle, and this query performance improvement was consistent across our 150 reports. We are seeing smooth operations, accurate data and fast performance in our production environment."

For Nongfu Spring, freight calculation procedures and functions that previously took 24 hours to execute were completed in SAP HANA in as little as 37 seconds, which enabled the company to reduce its account reconciliation process by one day. Additionally, the platform enabled NongFu Spring to bypass the traditional IT maintenance and data latency issues by synchronizing data from SAP and other heterogeneous data sources instantly into SAP HANA.

Largest Application Case of Enterprise Mobile Business Platform Across China

Nongfu Spring will continue rolling out SAP HANA across the enterprise. The company currently represents the largest application case of the enterprise mobile business platform across China, and has an army of representatives — more than 8,000 — visiting more than 1 million customers to send data from the mobile business platform. Nongfu Spring plans to introduce a mobile business solution that leverages SAP HANA at the end of October 2011.

"We continue to see strong interest from customers in adopting SAP HANA and transforming their companies into real-time businesses," said Dr. Christoph Kollatz, executive vice president, SAP HANA, SAP AG. "The results achieved by Nongfu Spring are just one great example of the potential the SAP HANA platform offers our customers. Now with the launch of the Experience SAP HANA community, everyone can engage with the platform and connect with others in the community to learn firsthand what it can do for their organization."

For more information, watch a video, "SAP HANA Live at Nongfu Spring," on the Experience SAP HANA community, launched today at SAP TechEd Las Vegas. The community enables participants to learn, try and implement SAP HANA, and to share knowledge and insights. Participants have access to demos, training videos, test-drives and implementation guidelines and can connect with experts and others to understand firsthand how SAP HANA can bring value to their organizations.

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SAP® TechEd 2011 in Las Vegas, Bangalore, Madrid, and Beijing

More than 19,000 SAP customers, partners and technical experts are expected to convene at SAP® TechEd 2011, the company's largest ecosystem education event series. The conference brings IT managers, software developers, administrators, and business process experts together for a look under the hood of today's business motors: the latest advances in in-memory and mobile technologies, and in on-premise, on-demand and on-device applications from SAP and more. In its 15^th year, SAP TechEd will be held in four locations around the globe: Las Vegas, Nevada, from September 12-16; Bangalore, India, from October 19-21; Madrid, Spain, from November 8-10; and Beijing, China, from November 15-17. Follow SAP TechEd on Twitter at @SAPTechEd and join the conversation at #SAPTechEd.

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