ORLANDO, Fla., May 16, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced innovations on the SAP HANA® platform, including the release of service pack 4, new access to a development sandbox for SAP HANA in the cloud via Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the next step in a program encouraging startups to develop on SAP HANA. SAP and HP also unveiled the first results on enhanced mixed load benchmark that highlights speed of ad-hoc analysis on detailed and fresh data. The announcement was made at SAPPHIRE® NOW, being held in Orlando, Florida, May 14-16, 2012.

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"SAP HANA is seeing widespread adoption and customer success. With SAP HANA SP4 we continue to raise the bar on breakthrough performance and extensive scale," said Dr. Vishal Sikka, member of the SAP Executive Board, Technology & Innovation. "We are committed to an open real-time platform for developers and end-users and will continue to provide this non-disruptively to our partners and customers."

Service Pack 4 for SAP HANA Now Generally Available

With the SAP HANA platform, customers can easily add new capabilities with service packs instead of costly upgrades. The newest service pack for SAP HANA also offers native text searching capabilities on structured and unstructured content, seamless and optimized interoperability with the R open-source statistical environment and additional in-database predictive and business functions for rapid deployment and faster processing. SAP HANA also expands the interoperability of platform support for "big data" by providing interoperability with the open source Apache™ Hadoop™ technologies.

• Native text searching: The additional native predictive and business functions within the SAP HANA database allow for developers, partners and customers to build powerful and fast predictive applications on the platform. Native text searching on structured and unstructured content offers the ability to procure, process, model and search text content directly in the real-time SAP HANA database, so results can run lighting fast and be called by business intelligence (BI) tools, applications or the forthcoming, planned SAP® BusinessObjects™ Predictive Analysis software. The functions can also be easily implemented, resulting in rapid application deployment and faster development. Several SAP business applications, such as SAP® Smart Meter Analytics software, and partner solutions utilize these functions for fast in-database predictive processing.
• R interoperability  with SAP HANA: Furthermore, the interoperability of R with SAP HANA opens up all the statistical functions available in one of the world's most popular open source projects to business analysts and data scientists who want to use the power of the SAP HANA platform. This new interoperability relies on a highly optimized and secure connection between SAP HANA and R to solve business-critical problems in real time. Analysts and developers can quickly and easily connect to and call R functions from within SAP HANA and make the results available for consumption by end users within seconds.
• Interoperability of SAP HANA with open source Apache™ Hadoop™:  SAP Data Services software will provide capabilities to use Hadoop as a data store and be interoperable with the "big data" Hadoop framework.
• In addition, this service pack supports the general availability of the SAP NetWeaver® Business Warehouse (SAP NetWeaver BW) application, which has become the most successful early adoption program in SAP history.

SAP HANA Now Available for Developers on Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Developer instances of SAP HANA are now available on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform. For the first time, developers can get access to the ground-breaking in-memory technology from SAP through a highly-scalable and low-cost infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). Developers who sign up are able to run their own pre-configured HANA instance to create their data analysis application. Along with a host of third-party development tools already available on AWS, this compelling and attractive solution is a major step for SAP to build-out the global ecosystem of SAP HANA developers. Developers can sign-up through the "SAP HANA Developer Center" page of SAP Community Network.

"SAP HANA on AWS for developers is an important milestone in our relationship with SAP," said Terry Wise, director, Worldwide Partner Ecosystem, Amazon Web Services. "With this offering, we are providing customers the ability to begin developing enterprise business applications leveraging the power of SAP HANA in a matter of minutes. The large scale in-memory capabilities on our scalable, flexible, pay-as-you-go platform will reduce the barrier of entry for many developers."

Startup Focus Program Enables Further Innovation on SAP HANA

The SAP Startup Focus program is designed to enable startups to innovate on SAP HANA as their underlying platform of choice. The ten startups currently in the accelerator program focus on areas as diverse as social media analytics from NextPrinciples and Passenger, to industry-specific solutions from Optessa, Nexvisionix, Basis Technologies and AlertEnterprise. Space-Time Insight and Ankhor Software offer new ways of visualizing data while Zettaset offers an integration solution for SAP HANA and Hadoop. For specific reports, the performance improvements the startups have seen with SAP HANA have ranged from 300 times to cases as extreme as Taulia's, which managed to reduce risk analysis business process from two to five days to under three seconds.

These startups are showcasing their applications at SAPPHIRE NOW onsite in the "SAP HANA Test Drive" area. To further underscore the company's intention to deliver SAP HANA as a platform for development, the SAP Startup Focus program is closely aligned with the new US$155 million "SAP HANA Real-Time Fund" to identify and foster such startups on an ongoing basis. For more information, visit the SAP Startup Focus program page on sap.com.

SAP Defines New Benchmark for SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse

In order to reflect evolving customer requirements which demand greater ad-hoc query capabilities on real-time data, SAP has developed a new standard application benchmark for the SAP NetWeaver® Business Warehouse (SAP NetWeaver BW) application called the enhanced mixed load (EML) benchmark. This standard performance benchmark is the first to provide a standard performance measurement of near real-time, ad-hoc analysis and reporting on continuously updated data.

HP is the first partner to deliver a certified result for this new EML benchmark. This benchmark showcases the ability of SAP NetWeaver BW on SAP HANA running on HP AppSystem for SAP HANA, to exceed customer expectations for high-performance analytics with near real-time data sets. For a detailed independent white paper describing the testing environment and business value, visit experiencesaphana.com.

SAP and HP to Help Organizations such as Hilti Corporation to Rapidly Deploy Large-Scale solutions on SAP HANA Platform

SAP and HP have partnered to help companies process and analyze higher volumes of data from business-critical applications to drive innovation with HP AppSystems for SAP HANA. The new scale-out solution of HP AppSystems for SAP HANA is a pre-integrated, tested and supported converged system featuring servers, storage, networking and management software. It is the first enterprise-class real-time analytics solution optimized to run SAP business application workloads while offering a completely automated failover mechanism for high availability and disaster tolerance technology. It includes HP ProLiant BladeSystem BL680c servers and the HP X9300 IBRIX Network Storage System with HP P6500 Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA).

Hilti Corporation, a leading provider of technology for the global construction industry, is one of the first organizations planning to run 30 terabytes of data from SAP NetWeaver BW powered by SAP HANA on the HP AppSystem for SAP HANA.

"SAP and HP are helping Hilti to provide better customer service and develop innovations in the global construction industry with SAP HANA and HP Converged Infrastructure, said Christian Ritter, head of Performance Competency Center, Finance, HR and Reporting, Global IT, Hilti. "We look forward to deploy our 30 TB of SAP NetWeaver BW on the SAP HANA platform and benefiting from SAP and HP's close collaboration in scale-out architecture."

To help organizations implement their roadmaps for SAP HANA in a more timely and cost-effective manner, HP and SAP are partnering to develop new rapid deployment solutions for SAP HANA.

"Exabytes of digital information are created, captured and replicated every day around the world, making it complicated and time-consuming for organizations to manage and exploit the data," said Martin Fink, senior vice president, Business Critical Systems, HP. "With HP AppSystems and rapid-deployment solutions for SAP HANA, organizations should be able to achieve real-time insight from their data, speeding and simplifying the decision-making process across the enterprise."

For announcements, blog posts, videos and other coverage during SAPPHIRE NOW, visit the Events Newsroom.

SAPPHIRE® NOW

With SAPPHIRE® NOW, SAP offers its customers, partners and prospects even more opportunities to engage in dialogue with peers, participants and thought leaders around the globe. Being held in Orlando, Florida, May 14-16, 2012, this enhanced, real-time event connects attendees on site with global participants through state-of-the-art broadcast studios and an online experience that incorporates the latest social media and community functionality. Whether on site or online, participants can gain insight as to how SAP is delivering on its product strategy and helping organizations around the world to run better. For more information, visit www.sapphirenow.com. Follow SAPPHIRE NOW on Twitter at @SAPPHIRENOW and visit the Events Newsroom at www.events.news-sap.com.

About SAP

As market leader in enterprise application software, SAP (NYSE: SAP) helps companies of all sizes and industries run better. From back office to boardroom, warehouse to storefront, desktop to mobile device – SAP empowers people and organizations to work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively to stay ahead of the competition. SAP applications and services enable more than 190,000 customers (includes customers from the acquisition of SuccessFactors) to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and grow sustainably. For more information, visit www.sap.com.

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