SAP HANA® to Make World's Largest, Most Global Business Network Smarter, Faster and More Powerful

WALLDORF, Germany, April 29, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Continuing its commitment to seamless innovation, SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced that Ariba, an SAP company, is moving to SAP® HANA, the leading in-memory platform for real-time computing. The initial step, involving the transition of Ariba^® Spend Visibility^™, was completed with zero down time, demonstrating the ease and simplicity available through SAP HANA. The company is now shifting the Ariba^® Network to the platform, which will enable participants in the business-to-business trading community to gain new insights into their operations and act on them more quickly than ever to drive unprecedented business outcomes and competitive advantage.

The Ariba Network on SAP HANA will create an entirely new cloud offering possible only from SAP. Companies will be able to glean predictive intelligence on risks, performance, capabilities, rates and more from the more than 15 years of transaction and relationship data and community-generated content that reside in the world's largest, most global business network. Leveraging the speed and power of SAP HANA, they can instantly process this information and enable innovative processes that dramatically improve their performance and productivity.

"We always knew the true potential of the SAP HANA platform would be realized by the applications that run on top," said Bill McDermott, co-CEO and member of the Executive Board of SAP AG. "The Ariba Network is already changing the way businesses work together with more than 1.5 million companies transacting half a trillion USD in commerce. With Ariba solutions on SAP HANA, companies will gain unprecedented real-time insights and transparency into their business networks. The network is a powerful example of the business value that only SAP can deliver in the cloud."

Smoothing the Transition
Customers across industries are already experiencing the benefits. SAP transitioned Ariba Spend Visibility to SAP HANA without disruption, upgrading thousands of companies and more than 4.7 million individual users instantly. These users are now processing key operational and analytical reports up to 100 times faster.

Seeing the Future
As SAP moves the Ariba Network to SAP HANA, companies will be able to analyze the vast volumes of information they have on their businesses faster than ever before. This includes structured data on production, marketing, sales and pricing, HR, finance, facilities and operations, as well as transaction-level data from supplier, customer and partner relationships, and unstructured data such as blogs and Tweets.

With SAP HANA, data loads 30 times faster and is instantly accessible. So once a sourcing project, contract or invoice is initiated on the network, companies can immediately perform more complex analyses based on an expanded set of variables, including cost centers, purchase price variances and micro regions, and receive results in real time.

Leveraging SAP® Lumira™, the company's visualization software, they will be able to see and interact with their data in entirely new ways and outline more informed strategies that advance their business goals. Suppliers, for instance, will for the first time be able to access their complete transaction history with a given customer and create intuitive data visualizations that allow them to understand how their payment cycles are trending or whether their invoice rejection rates are improving.

"This really represents the ultimate Big Data opportunity," said Andrew Bartolini, chief research officer of Ardent Partners, an independent research firm in Boston. "With the Ariba Network on SAP HANA, you now have the co-location of transactional information, communication that supports those transactions, and the ability to quickly analyze and make decisions based upon that, all within one central location. And that's very powerful."

The new capabilities, which can be added on an "opt-in" basis, will provide buyers and sellers with complete flexibility and choice to meet the demands of their business and accelerate the results that they deliver. SAP will preview these capabilities and show the power of the Ariba Network on SAP HANA at SAPPHIRE® NOW, being held June 3-5, 2014, in Orlando, Florida.

For more information, visit the SAP News Center. Follow SAP on Twitter at @sapnews.

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 258,000 customers to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and grow sustainably. For more information, visit www.sap.com.

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