SAP Delivers Real-Time Spatial Data Analysis With SAP HANA

SAP AG has announced it has joined forces with Esri, a geographic information system (GIS) and location analytics provider, to more deeply integrate GIS solutions with platforms and enterprise applications from SAP in order to improve business efficiency and decision-making. Esri and SAP are committed to helping SAP customers and the spatial data industry benefit from integration between SAP solutions and Esri’s leading GIS platform.

Through co-innovation between SAP and Esri, an end-to-end support for spatial data is planned across SAP HANA, the SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) platform and SAP Mobile Platform, aiming to offer organisations the ability to enrich SAP Business Suite applications with geographic content, rapidly process spatial, location and enterprise data using SAP HANA in real time, visualise geographic information in maps, graphs and charts using tools from the SAP BusinessObjects portfolio and deliver applications to field workers that effectively process geospatial and business data using SAP Mobile Platform.

“SAP plans to provide real-time high-performance processing of spatial data with SAP HANA, a single platform for transactions, analytics and big data,” said Steve Lucas, executive vice president and general manager, Analytics, Database and Platform, SAP. “By integrating with the Esri ArcGIS platform across SAP HANA, SAP BusinessObjects BI platform and SAP Mobile Platform, and by enriching SAP Business Suite applications with spatial content, we want to enable customers to combine the added dimension of location information with enterprise data, in real time. This will give businesses a new level of immediacy in their decision-making capabilities and will increase their competitive advantage.”

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SAP plans to expand the SAP HANA platform with the introduction of spatial data processing capabilities that combine location data with enterprise data to enrich and enhance real-time business applications. Furthermore, Esri and SAP intend to optimise connectivity between Esri ArcGIS and SAP HANA via Query Layers, which will allow Esri ArcGIS users to push spatial processing into SAP HANA, unleashing high-performing and real-time capabilities.

SAP plans to enable customers and independent software vendors (ISVs) to consume, process and analyse spatial, transactional and text data within one unified platform for predictive, location-based solutions based on big data. In addition, the company intends to offer SAP HANA customers a native application development platform, including geo-content and location services, to quickly develop and deploy spatially-based solutions. SAP HANA is an open platform allowing BI tools, as well as customer, partner and SAP applications, to leverage the breadth and depth of real-time, spatial processing capabilities.

The SAP BusinessObjects BI suite and SAP applications share a common HTML5 visualisation platform and software development kit (SDK). The SDK is planned to enable organisations to extend their visualisations with 50 pre-built chart types, geographic maps and advanced visualisations. SAP is enhancing the SDK to include the Esri API for Javascript. SAP aims to help customers leverage existing Esri ArcGIS server and licensed online Esri maps inside BI tools from the SAP BusinessObjects portfolio. SAP Lumira software is planned to be the first SAP product to offer the embedded Esri API.
SAP plans to add new integration using the SDK for SAP Mobile Platform to extend companies’ geospatial data from ESRI ArcGIS systems to mobile field employees. Similar to desktop systems, SAP Mobile Platform is planned to enable application users to manipulate interactive maps and to obtain extremely detailed information on the geographic region in question. By tying into SAP Business Suite, mobile apps like SAP Work Manager and SAP CRM Service Manager are intended to effectively combine business process information like work orders, parts inventory levels and historical asset information with geospatial data to give mobile users an extremely rich, multi-system work environment. For instance, SAP plans to enable mobile users to efficiently find jobs and assets nearby, filter for equipment by location and view work orders from a map. Such use cases can serve to completely eliminate paper data entry and the hunt for the right information.

“Esri ArcGIS is the leading platform for organisations implementing a location analytics strategy through the geo-enablement of their enterprise business systems,” said Chris Cappelli, director, Sales, Esri. “By working with SAP to integrate ArcGIS across SAP HANA, analytic solutions and SAP Mobile Platform, intends that customers can easily leverage Esri within their SAP landscape.”