SAP Launches Big Data SAP HANA Update

German software maker SAP has unveiled a new product that it says will help businesses cope with the onslaught of Big Data in today’s hyperconnected world.

SAP HANA Vora, as the product is called, is an in-memory computing platform for Hadoop, and “enables real-time business, delivers business agility, is able to scale and provides contextual awareness”, according to Quentin Clark, SAP’s CTO.

Apache Hadoop

HANA Vora works within Apache Hadoop, an open source platform that lets companies make sense of Big Data sets. With the release, SAP is hoping to retain the business customers who are looking to use Big Data to transform their companies.

SAP said that some of the ways HANA Vora can benefit users include mitigating risk and fraud by detecting anomalies in fiscal transactions, optimising telecommunication bandwidth by analysing traffic patterns to avoid bottlenecks, and delivering ‘preventative maintenance’ to products by analysing service records and sensor data.

One of Vora’s first customers is Intel, which said it is using the platform to help manage large unstructured data sets.

“One of the key requirements for us is to have better analyses of Big Data, but mining these large data sets for contextual information in Hadoop is a challenge,” said Aziz Safa, vice president, Intel IT Enterprise Applications.

“SAP HANA Vora will provide us with the capability to conduct OLAP (online analytical processing) directly on these large, rich data sets all in-memory and stored in Hadoop. This will allow us to extract contextual information and then push those valuable insights back to our business.”

SAP HANA Vora is planned to be released to customers in late September; a cloud-based developer edition is planned to be available at the same time.

Cloud updates

SAP also this week unveiled general updates to its HANA Cloud Platform, including better interoperability with IoT sensors, and new ways for developers to collaborate with eachother.

Also announced was a trial of a tax calculation service in the form of an API, which can offer global tax sums as it works with with the legal tax aspects of more than 75 countries.

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