SAP, HP Collaborate on Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing

SAP and Hewlett-Packard announced the expansion of their business intelligence collaboration, through the integration of SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse with the HP Neoview enterprise data warehouse platform, on Oct. 13.

The integrated product will allow users to deploy SAP NetWeaver BW and SAP’s BI-oriented analytical applications on the HP Neoview platform, which provides for sorting, managing and accessing massive amounts of database information via parallel processing and shared-nothing architecture. Theoretically, the integration will optimize the end-user acquisition and provisioning of high-volume operational data.

A customer beta will start in the first quarter of 2010, with the first version of the combined offering available in the second quarter. Customers already deploying SAP NetWeaver BW will not need to migrate or reimplement in order to leverage the HP Neoview platform.

"As we are talking to customers, we hear their need for real-time access to their growing volumes of mission-critical business information," Kristina Robinson, vice president and general manager for HP’s Business Intelligence Solutions, said in a statement. "Through the integration of HP Neoview and SAP NetWeaver BW, customers will have improved scalability and flexibility within their data warehouse on several dimensions such as number of users, data size, as well as volume and mix of queries."

Part of HP’s focus through 2009 has been on the enterprise, including a SAAS (software as a service) offering in March that combined security, performance and availability applications, and analytics into its HP Cloud Assure package. Linking the HP Application Security Center, HP Performance Center and HP Business Availability Center onto a SAAS platform, HP Cloud Assure scans applications, networks, Web applications and middleware layers for security threats while attempting to boost system performance.

That platform marks HP’s continued embrace of cloud computing. Even before the HP Cloud Assure rollout in March, HP had been collaborating on the development of open-source cloud computing test beds with Intel and Yahoo.

In May, SAP and HP announced their collaboration for speeding up business transactions for messages sized from 7MB to 15MB, with HP rolling out a server-based X M L accelerator for speeding the mapping of X M L messages within the SAP NetWeaver Process Integration technology.

The companies claimed that their new accelerator translated into a 700 percent improvement in the processing time needed for a single X M L message, and a 400 percent improvement in volume of messages processed.