SAP Helps Customers Achieve Real-Time Big Data Results With SAP HANA® and Hadoop

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 11, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced the expansion of big data offerings around three major pillars: the SAP HANA® platform, applications enabled for big data and data science. SAP has entered reseller agreements with Intel and Hortonworks to resell and support the Intel® Distribution Apache Hadoop® and the Hortonworks Data Platform with SAP HANA, expanding existing partnerships with both vendors. SAP also announced a new big data-enabled application for manufacturers. Furthermore, SAP has created a new Data Science organization to better help customers uncover relevant signals within their data. Additionally, the "Big Data Geek Challenge" is now open. The announcements were made at TechCrunch Disrupt, being held September 7-11 in San Francisco.

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"The SAP HANA platform and its integration with Hadoop have married together real-time insights with extreme storage, solving one of the biggest problems with current big data solutions, a fragmented landscape of solutions that are difficult to connect together," said Steve Lucas, president, Platform Solutions, SAP. "Our expanded big data strategy provides customers a single, integrated approach to combine enterprise data and additional information to employees and consumers, as well as improve business processes such as customer engagement, preventative maintenance and responsive supply chain."

SAP Partners With Intel and Hortonworks to Redistribute Apache Hadoop
SAP has signed agreements to redistribute and support Intel Distribution Apache Hadoop and Hortonworks Data Platform to customers. Customers are envisioned to be able to purchase big data solutions supported by SAP and leveraging capabilities of market-leading technologies such as SAP HANA, Apache Hadoop, SAP® Sybase® IQ software, SAP® Data Services software and SAP® BusinessObjects™ business intelligence (BI) solutions. Integration with Apache Hadoop is part of SAP's overall strategy to provide valuable insights across a continuum of data from the efficient storage of massive amounts of cold data, to petabyte-level storage of warm data to real-time and streaming data analysis.

"Enterprises today are looking for big data solutions that are simple and quick to implement that enable insight from all data in real time in a secure environment to improve business processes," said Boyd David, vice president and general manager of Intel's Datacenter Software Division. "With performance optimizations for Intel hardware as well as encryption and decryption improvements for better security, the integration of the Intel Distribution for Apache Hadoop with the SAP HANA platform provides enterprises with security and scalability without having to sacrifice performance."

"By reselling the Hortonworks Data Platform, SAP can assure their customers they are deploying an SAP HANA and Hadoop architecture fully supported by SAP, while giving them the benefits of a fully open source Hadoop distribution," said Shaun Connolly, vice president, Corporate Strategy, Hortonworks. "Hortonworks is committed to contributing all of its innovations back to the Apache project, ensuring that 100 percent of their Hadoop distribution is open source." 

Today's news expands on existing partnerships SAP previously announced with Intel in February 2013. Additionally, SAP intends to continue to certify and support all the Apache Hadoop distributions as a part of the overall SAP partner program.

SAP Announces Demand Signal Management Application for Manufacturers
Manufacturers are striving to become demand-driven in order to be more responsive to their customers' needs. To do so, manufacturers need visibility and access to downstream demand data and customer insight. Powered by SAP HANA, the SAP® Demand Signal Management application is intended to allow companies to meet these needs by:

• Capturing large volumes of downstream demand signals, i.e., a retailer's point-of-sale data, along with market research data and consumer sentiment.
• Gaining valuable and real-time insights that shall help enable supply chain, sales and marketing functions to become more responsive and demand-driven

SAP Demand Signal Management is the first in a series of big data-enabled applications SAP intends to release before the end of 2013, including the SAP® Fraud Management analytic application as well as the SAP® Customer Engagement Intelligence solution, which includes the SAP® Audience Discovery and Targeting, SAP® Customer Value Intelligence, SAP® Social Contact Intelligence and SAP® Account Intelligence analytic applications. By deploying big data-enabled applications, enterprises can get to repeatable, measurable results much faster by infusing insights directly into day-to-day operations.

SAP Demand Signal Management shall combine captured data with internal business data to provide a holistic view of how customer demand and sales are materializing in real time. State-of-the-art analytics shall help visualize and analyze this data at any level of granularity as well as cross-navigate to SAP® Business Suite applications.

SAP Taps Top Data Scientist Talent to Help Customers Drive Value from Big Data
The new Data Science organization at SAP brings together the top data scientist talent within the company by consolidating regional data science teams into a central organization closely aligned to the overall big data strategy. The role of the new organization within the company's big data strategy includes:

• Helping companies understand the link between the business imperative and disparate volumes of data
• Uncovering insights to predict and shape the future with breakthrough data science innovation
• Building proprietary customer solutions, extending existing solutions and optimizing big data-enabled SAP applications
• Applying a portfolio of patents and intellectual property to SAP applications

"Every fantasy football participant is looking for innovative ways to gain the competitive edge. One example of innovation is applying more information and sophisticated analytics to improve the fantasy football experience to allow each player to make better, smarter and faster decisions on their teams." said Cory Mummery, senior director, NFL Fantasy and Digital Media. "Easy-to-use resources such as the player comparison tool give users guided instructions to make the best possible game-day decisions by factoring in years of statistical performance and intangibles such as weather, injuries, game location, player rest and more."

SAP Announces Big Data Contests
To inspire the data community to discover and tell the most compelling stories using data, SAP has launched a new contest where participants can use new visualizations and big data technologies to demonstrate how they have turned data into meaningful insights that drive change, however big or small. In the "Big Data Geek Challenge," participants will have the chance to win US$10,000 or a trip to SAPPHIRE® NOW by demonstrating how they can tap into big data to drive new innovations for a specific business process or opportunity. Additional prizes will be awarded for submissions that highlight a big data use case to further a good cause, as well as one for the top partner submission. For more information on the contest rules and prizes, visit www.sapbigdata.com/challenge

In addition, SAP is announcing an upcoming contest with Chevrolet calling for developers to submit connected car applications to help solve global mobility challenges. For additional information on the contest, visit www.connectedcarcontest2013.com.

For more information, visit the SAP Newsroom.

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 248,500 customers to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and grow sustainably. For more information, visit www.sap.com.

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