SAP Unveils Unified Strategy for Real-Time Data Management to Grow Database Market Leadership

SAN FRANCISCO, April 10, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced its innovation road map to help transform the database and mobile markets. At a press conference held this morning in San Francisco, Dr. Vishal Sikka, member of the SAP Executive Board, Technology & Innovation, highlighted the full integration of Sybase and unveiled the company's vision for the SAP real-time data platform, comprising the SAP HANA® platform, Sybase data management offerings and SAP solutions for enterprise information management (EIM). SAP also announced its most recent innovations for the real-time data platform, including:

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• General availability of the SAP NetWeaver® Business Warehouse (SAP NetWeaver BW) component powered by SAP HANA
• General availability of SAP® Sybase® Adaptive Server® Enterprise (ASE) as a database option for SAP® Business Suite applications
• Plans to launch a US$155 million venture fund for startups to build on the new platform and a US$337 million incentive program for customers to move to SAP HANA

"SAP is redefining the database market by combining the innovation and expertise of SAP and Sybase," said Dr. Hasso Plattner, chairman of the SAP Supervisory Board. "At its core is the innovative and now proven in-memory database SAP HANA, which helps customers access and deliver information at unprecedented speeds up to 100,000 times faster than before and enables them to envision fundamentally new ways of running their businesses. Customers can run existing systems more efficiently while easily embracing new technologies."

To extend its vision to provide customers one logical, real-time platform for all transaction and analytics workloads, SAP will leverage the industry-leading Sybase data management and movement products. With the evolutionary and non-disruptive integration of SAP and Sybase products, customers will have unprecedented capabilities to transact, move, store, process and analyze data in real time while reducing costs with common design and landscape management capabilities. The SAP real-time data platform will simplify layers of complexity and deliver unmatched capabilities in next-generation "big data" applications and analytics and enhanced support for cloud and mobile applications — all with minimal customer disruption.

SAP today provided the following road map details and areas of strategic innovation and investment of its database portfolio to increase its database market leadership by 2015:

• SAP HANA platform: This state-of-the-art in-memory platform is planned to be the core of the SAP real-time data platform, offering extreme performance and innovation for next-generation applications.
• SAP Sybase ASE: SAP Sybase ASE is intended as a supported option for SAP Business Suite applications while SAP HANA is planned to augment the extreme transactions of SAP Sybase ASE with real-time reporting capabilities.
• SAP® Sybase IQ® server: SAP Sybase IQ is planned to deliver data management for "big data" analytics, offering extreme total cost of ownership (TCO). Progressive integration with SAP HANA is intended to provide a smart store for aged/cold data. SAP Sybase IQ is envisioned to share common capabilities and life-cycle management with the SAP HANA platform.
• SAP® Sybase® SQL Anywhere: This market-leading mobile and embedded database with millions of deployments is planned to be the front-end database for the SAP HANA platform, extending its reach to mobile and embedded applications in real time.
• SAP® Sybase® PowerDesigner software: This flagship data modeling, information architecture and orchestration software is envisioned to become the foundation of the modeling solution for the SAP real-time data platform, offering a large base of experts to customers. Ford Motor Company recently selected the software to drive its data modeling and management and centralize all logical and physical modeling functions.
• SAP® Sybase® Event Stream Processor (ESP) software, SAP® Sybase® Replication Server and SAP solutions for EIM: Combined, these offerings are intended to provide data assessment and integration of batch, real-time change data capture and streaming data into the SAP real-time data platform.
• SAP real-time data platform integrated with Hadoop: SAP HANA and SAP Sybase IQ are planned to extend support for accessing "big data" sources such as Hadoop, and offer a deeply integrated pre-processing infrastructure.

SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse Powered by SAP HANA is Generally Available

SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse powered by SAP HANA entered ramp-up on November 7, 2011, and in five months achieved the milestones necessary to become generally available. Ramp-up customers reported significant gains in query performance, massive reduction in load times and compression of data size, significantly reducing amount of data to store and backup. This is a first step in enabling the SAP real-time data platform for both data warehousing and analytic use cases.

"Real-time insight that combines our customer demand and marketing promotion with supply chain visibility on a rock-solid enterprise-class data platform is a must in our industry," said Weijun Zhang, deputy director, Shanghai Volkswagen. "With SAP HANA, we see a tremendous opportunity to dramatically improve our enterprise data warehouse solutions with SAP NetWeaver BW powered by SAP HANA, drastically reducing data latency and improving speed when we can return query results in 45 seconds versus waiting up to 20 minutes for empty results from SAP NetWeaver BW running on a traditional disk-based database platform."

"The go-live of SAP NetWeaver BW on SAP HANA is a significant milestone at Lenovo," said Xiaoyu Liu, vice president, GM Global Application Development, Lenovo Beijing. "We have much faster and greater capabilities for advanced operational and analytics reporting, which will improve our end-to-end business efficiency, productivity and agility to enable us to react to changing market situation quickly. With the rapid SAP HANA implementation, it proves that we are able to turn the product into a solution reality at Lenovo without any business disruption. We will continue our journey of leveraging SAP HANA to enable and empower our business to become No. 1."

SAP Business Suite on SAP Sybase ASE Generally Available in April

With SAP Business Suite on SAP Sybase ASE, SAP plans to offer optimal integration with a commitment to provide new and existing customers with end-to-end application and database solutions, along with integrated maintenance and synchronized releases. As an integral part of the SAP real-time data platform, SAP Sybase ASE brings to SAP applications a proven database management system that has been in use for more than 25 years in highly demanding, mission-critical transactional environments across industries. With more than 30,000 customers, SAP Sybase ASE has a loyal and committed customer base with a 97 percent customer satisfaction rating thanks to its high performance, reliability, world-class technical support and low cost of ownership. Customers in production today with SAP Business Suite on SAP Sybase ASE are already seeing these benefits.

"Our SAP ERP migration to SAP Sybase ASE was driven by the need to lower overall costs and improve operational agility while at the same time delivering systems in a highly available and high-performance environment," said Juan Stagg, CIO, El Machetazo. "The ability to work with one company to achieve these goals has proven to be a winning solution for El Machetazo. One of the surprising benefits of our SAP ERP migration was how quickly and smoothly we were able to migrate SAP Sybase ASE — it took half the time we anticipated and I measure it in hours rather than days or weeks."

US$155 Million Venture Fund for Startups, US$337 Million Database Migration Adoption Program

To bolster innovation in the startup community, SAP is creating a new fund of US$155 million, managed by SAP Ventures. To be named the "SAP HANA Real-Time Fund," it will be used to foster and support an ecosystem of entrepreneurs and investors focused on the development of real-time applications. This announcement comes on the heels of the first SAP Startup Forum, which was held in Palo Alto in March and featured 24 startups leveraging the SAP HANA platform.

In addition, SAP is delivering on its promise of game-changing innovation. The company is prioritizing its investments based on customer input and today launched the US$337 million "SAP HANA Adoption Program," dedicated to customer adoption of SAP HANA and the SAP real-time data platform. For any new customers transitioning from legacy databases, SAP will invest in SAP® Consulting services for customers to adopt and implement SAP HANA. Separately, SAP is announcing a commitment to SAP HANA customers that have completed implementation to allow up to an 18-month exchange program out of their SAP HANA licenses to any other previously licensed SAP product if they are not satisfied.

"SAP's vision is focused on enabling a paradigm shift in data management: transforming enterprise IT departments from complex and slow landscapes—struggling to deliver on organizational objectives—to a simplified architecture that enables new classes of 'big data,' cloud and mobile applications in addition to renewing existing applications non-disruptively," said Sikka. "Recent advances in process, memory and networking technologies have made this vision a reality."

For additional information regarding SAP HANA and in-memory computing technology, visit the Experience SAP HANA page. For more information, visit the SAP Newsroom. Follow SAP on Twitter at @SAPInMemory and @sapnews, and join the conversation using hashtags #SAP, #HANA and #database.

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 183,000 customers (includes customers from the acquisition of Sybase) to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and grow sustainably. For more information, visit www.sap.com.

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