SAP Extends Real-Time Data Platform With Big Data Capabilities

SAP AG has announced advanced support and integration with Hadoop environments including an expanded “big data” partner council and customer showcases. These “big data” integration capabilities are planned in SAP Data Services and SAP Information Steward software with the release of service pack 4 for the SAP HANA platform. SAP also showcased game-changing business results among customers, made possible by “big data” implementations based on the SAP real-time data platform.

The SAP real-time data platform, based on the flagship SAP HANA platform, includes data management capabilities from SAP Sybase IQ, SAP Sybase ESP, SAP Sybase ASE and SAP Enterprise Information Management. It unlocks business value from “big data” by providing for real-time decision support within the window of opportunity with extreme capabilities to ingest, store and process big data in real-time.

“Groundbreaking innovations like SAP HANA help our customers access and deliver information at unprecedented speeds - up to 100,000 times faster than before - and empower them with fundamentally new ways to run their businesses and master ‘big data,’” said Steve Lucas, Global Executive Vice President and General Manager, Database & Technology, SAP “The SAP real-time data platform delivers an information value chain that uncovers and harnesses the right information at the right moment by moving data among SAP HANA, SAP Sybase IQ and Hadoop file systems.”

SAP envisions SAP Data Services and SAP Information Steward as the industry’s first and only unified solution for data quality, data integration, text data processing, data profiling and metadata management. The company aims to allow users to unlock the full business potential of “big data” by making it easier to integrate and synthesize information across an enterprise’s SAP and non-SAP applications.

SAP Data Services and SAP Information Steward are intended to provide both business users and IT with an intuitive and comprehensive information management solution with planned enhancements that includes the Hadoop integration, which enables reading from and loading to Hive and Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), rapid batch updating and loading to SAP HANA, SAP Sybase IQ server and any other data store, resulting in faster performance.

It also includes text data processing, which extends the data view to analyse data sources by performing linguistic analysis and extracting relevant content from files, Web logs and social media.

The available authoritative and trustworthy data which helps users understand, assess and improve the quality of data by integrating data quality scorecards directly within business intelligence (BI) and enterprise applications so users can immediately determine the accuracy of the data and if necessary take corrective action.

“Our goal is to help organisations access build and govern information value chains across all data sources,” said Lucas. “With our enterprise information management solutions, customers will have the ability to easily understand and access any data source - be it from an SAP, custom or partner application, enterprise database or new data sources such as Hadoop - so they can now better manage information throughout the organisation.”

SAP has set up a “big data” partner council that will co-innovate to produce solutions uncovering use cases and architectures that leverage the SAP real-time data platform and Hadoop. The council will include a cross-section of companies, including startups, hardware vendors, software providers and technology services organisations that will collaborate together with SAP on select projects in the SAP Co-Innovation Lab. The cornerstone of this strategy is building a strong integration with the Hadoop ecosystem, starting with Cloudera, the leading provider of enterprise-grade Hadoop data management software, services and training. By co-innovating with Cloudera, the top contributor to the Hadoop development community, SAP plans to enable customers to go beyond business analytics and into the world of next-generation applications that innovate on data and open the door to myriad new possibilities.