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Back in December 2010, SAP re-invigorated its entire business with the introduction of the HANA (high-performance analytic appliance) in-memory database. Since then, it has grown into an almost-$2 billion business for the German software company, and prospects continue to look good for sales going into 2017.
At its SAP TechEd Conference Nov. 8 in Barcelona, the company announced that it soon will release a new version of the speedy database, SAP HANA 2, which includes new features and enhancements involving database management, data management, analytical intelligence and application development.
In moving with the flow of the container development trend led by Docker and Google Kubernetes, SAP said that HANA microservices in the cloud also will become available via SAP Hybris as a Service software (also known as YaaS) to enable richer insight to be embedded into new-generation applications.
YaaS is a microservices ecosystem that helps enterprises to rapidly augment and build new, highly flexible solutions. Details on the new features include:
—Database management: IT organizations will be able to provide business continuity with enhanced high availability, security, workload management and administration enhancements. For example, the new active/active read-enabled option enables IT organizations to leverage secondary systems–previously used only for system replication–to offload read-intensive workloads for improved operations.
—Data management: Businesses are expected to use data, regardless of where it resides, with enhancements to enterprise modeling, data integration, data quality and tiered storage. A new edition of the SAP Enterprise Architecture Designer Web application that works with and is powered by SAP HANA allows IT organizations to manage complex information architectures and visualize the potential impact of new technologies before they are implemented.
—Analytical intelligence: Developers are embedding rich insight into applications with enhanced analytical processing engines for text, spatial, graph and streaming data. For example, new algorithms for classification, association, time series and regression have been added to the predictive analytics library to empower data scientists to discover new patterns and incorporate machine learning into custom applications.
—Application development: Developers are expected to build and deploy next-generation applications with enhanced functions for application servers, development tools and languages. Bring-your-own-language support provides a choice of additional third-party build packs and runtimes that can be used within SAP HANA extended application services, advanced model. Also, a new file processor API enables developers to extract text and metadata from documents to deliver deeper insights.
Along with the announcement, SAP said that it will provide technology enhancements twice a year in the HANA package to support agile IT development.
HANA 2 is planned to be released to customers on Nov. 30. The express edition of SAP HANA 2 will be available for delivery shortly after general availability to help organizations jump-start new development projects, the company said.
BusinessObjects Also Gets a Retrofit
In the same set of announcements at TechEd Barcelona, SAP revealed that several new features and capabilities are now available across the SAP BusinessObjects portfolio of cloud and on-premises solutions.
–SAP BusinessObjects Cloud is now available for purchase via a credit card in 34 countries at SAPStore.com through a simple checkout process.
–New enhancements in SAP BusinessObjects Cloud include data wrangling capabilities taking advantage of embedded machine learning to provide data profiling, error detection, and recommended visualizations. Live connectivity to SAP S/4HANA is now available.
–SAP plans to enable organizations to interact with data using SAP Digital Boardroom and Microsoft Surface Hub by providing an interactive display of Digital Boardroom content within the collaborative, touchscreen device.
–SAP BusinessObjects Roambi is now available globally in 25 countries around the world.
–SAP continues to innovate the core analytics technology with updates to SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) and planned enhancements for SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analytics.