SAP Unveils Three Dimensions of New Innovation for SAP HANA® Platform

LAS VEGAS, Oct. 22, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today entered a new era of beauty, power and simplicity with advances on three fronts, all aimed at enhancing the overall experience with the SAP HANA® platform. A visually appealing, intuitive and intelligent user experience with SAP Fiori™ apps, simplified cloud-based deployment options for the infrastructure of SAP HANA and powerful new features in service pack 7 (SP7) for SAP HANA are all intended to address the needs of the real-time enterprise for customers, developers, startups and partners alike. The announcement was made at SAP® TechEd, being held October 21-25 in Las Vegas.

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"It is incredible to see thousands of customers, startups, partners and developers, as well as more than a million students, touching SAP HANA every day," said Dr. Vishal Sikka, member of the Executive Board of SAP AG, Products & Innovation. "With this latest release of SAP HANA, we enhance our users' experience with beautiful design and simplify access to all the powerful new features of the platform. We are achieving the unprecedented ability to calculate in real time things that were previously unimaginable with SAP HANA on 10,000 CPU cores. This is quite literally making the impossible possible. This is the 'SAP HANA Effect' and it is changing the landscape of IT."

SAP Helps Customers Create Beautiful Apps, Launching Design Services
Based on the success and demand for SAP Fiori, SAP is now launching user experience (UX) design services to help customers take advantage of the "design thinking" approach. The services will consist of a team of professional designers working alongside customers in an innovative and collaborative model with real end-user participation to develop compelling user experiences across any app or solution. The team will bring together innovative design methodologies, including design thinking, user research, interaction design and visual design, to create end user-focused business scenarios and apps. The team will work with customers to extend existing SAP solutions with new user interfaces, to co-innovate and to wholly create new apps and solutions.

"We have the tools and technologies to support a user-centered design methodology," said Ben Salter, head of Enterprise Architecture and Application Development, Valero Energy. "Now we have to change the way we engage. Design skills are rapidly becoming the premium."

Doing More With Less: Simplifying the Custom Application Development Experience
With SP7 for SAP HANA, the open application development experience is planned to be broadened and is intended to be language-agnostic. Developers shall be able to take advantage of the core data services (CDS) and pre-packaged data quality libraries to foster reuse and rapid development.

Furthermore, SAP HANA smart data access technology has been enhanced with the capability to write, and has been extended to include sources such as Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server. Smart data access also provides tighter Hadoop integration via Hortonworks. To further expand the use of data, SAP has also added the ability to create custom text analysis dictionaries for processing unstructured data the way business applications need it.

Simplify Mission-Critical Deployments in Enterprise Data Centers
With SAP HANA SP7, SAP plans to continue to add new features supporting high availability/disaster recovery (HA/DR) deployment, such as snapshots and logs for replay, as well as cascading system replication for complex multi-host metro and stretch cluster configurations. New unified install/patching tools and enhanced monitoring of operations continue to simplify the administrative experience.

In addition to delivering SAP HANA as a packaged appliance, SAP plans to help further reduce data center costs by re-purposing customers' enterprise storage with the SAP HANA tailored data center integration application. SAP HANA customers shall be able to plan and validate customized storage configurations for SAP HANA with SAP partners for enterprise storage and the SAP HANA appliance. Furthermore, SAP is beginning the pilot program for the next phase, which shall focus on inclusion and reuse of enterprise networking into the infrastructure design of SAP HANA. More information  on SAP HANA tailored data center integration is available at www.saphana.com.

SAP To Introduce New Cloud Infrastructure Services for Quick, Affordable Access to SAP HANA
To address the fast and nimble nature of today's market, SAP plans to introduce new subscription-based options for the infrastructure of SAP HANA to allow simpler deployment in a matter of minutes. Customers, startups and partners are envisioned to bring their SAP HANA license and access infrastructure directly from the SAP HANA® Marketplace. Scale, access and payment shall be simpler and based on the customer's requirements.

• Infrastructure service from SAP is planned to be available for 128 GB, 256 GB, 512 GB and 1 TB instances of main memory and are planned to be backed by SAP-managed certified infrastructure and enterprise support. They are available for private beta today.
• To offer even more choice, SAP HANA infrastructure is also planned for availability from 244 GB to 1.2TB instances of main memory via the Amazon Web Services public cloud.
• The new cloud offerings shall complement the previously announced SAP NetWeaver® Business Warehouse application powered by SAP HANA, which today is available on a free trial basis, also on SAP HANA Marketplace.

To learn more, visit www.saphana.com. For more information, including additional announcements and coverage from SAP TechEd Las Vegas, visit the SAP Newsroom.

SAP® TechEd in 2013: Las Vegas, Amsterdam, and Bangalore
SAP customers, partners, and technical experts are expected to convene at SAP® TechEd in 2013, the company's premier technical conference. Hands-on workshops, demo-driven lectures, and Q&A sessions on the latest developments in analytics, mobile, cloud, database, and in-memory computing enable SAP TechEd attendees to enhance their skills while making valuable connections with peers and IT experts from the SAP community. SAP TechEd is being held in Las Vegas, Nevada, from October 21-25, and will be held in Amsterdam, Netherlands, from November 5-7; and Bangalore, India, from December 11-13. Follow SAP TechEd on Twitter at @SAPTechEd and join the conversation at #SAPTechEd.

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 251,000 customers to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and grow sustainably. For more information, visit www.sap.com.

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