It’s not enough to be fast — you might just race yourself off a cliff. You’ve got to be in control. And you’ve got to know exactly where you’re going.

“I call this Business Velocity,” said Dalgaard, a member of both SAP’s executive and global managing boards. “Business Velocity is about empowering companies to out-execute competitors by engaging their customers, partners, and employees in new ways to innovate and create deeper relationships, and empowering them to execute at scale.”

Full Speed Ahead
Dalgaard’s post goes on to extol the profound value of cloud computing, which he surely would have done at the SAPPHIRE NOW keynote Wednesday. Unfortunately, he was unable to attend SAP’s annual conference in Orlando.

But speed and direction were both part of SAP co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe’s keynote on Wednesday. SAP will continue its primary focus on the customer, recommending in-memory for all data and the cloud for all systems.

“We are committed to deliver the most exciting user experience in the industry,” Snabe said. “Business evolves through innovation.”

Flying high and innovating in the cloud won’t be the only thing on SAP’s agenda. Snabe also set SAP’s course for mobile and in-memory.

“HANA is the biggest innovation in the last 20 years in business software,” Snabe said. Around 1,500 customers are using SAP HANA, which provides real-time optimization of business processes while reducing consumption.

Setting the Record Straight
SAPPHIRE NOW has also been an opportunity to clear up misperceptions about SAP’s flagship in-memory platform. For example, some are under the impression that HANA isn’t a database.

“The reality is that HANA is a complete platform of application services for database,” John Appleby, global head of Business Analytics & Technology at London-based global management consultancy Bluefin Solutions, told SiliconANGLE on Wednesday. “It’s the end-to-end, it keeps your information safe, secure, and it makes it fast.”

Fast is only part of the equation, as Dalgaard noted in Wired. When a firm clearly defines the plan, and gets its employees, clients and partners on the same page, it can truly run better and outcompete its rivals.

Follow Derek on Twitter: @DKlobucher

Related Media:
“Velocity Wins in Today’s Fast-Changing Business World” in Wired Innovation Insights
“Live Blog: Sapphire Now, SAP co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe on HANA in the Enterprise” in The VAR Guy
“Have We Been Properly Introduced? Dispelling Misconceptions About SAP HANA” in Silicon ANGLE

This post originally appeared on SAP Business Trends.

“The increased fund size is fundamentally a testament to the strong interest of entrepreneurs and VCs in collaborating with SAP and the SAP ecosystem.  This increased funding will enable us to continue building our differentiated investment platform by both extending our investment horizon for the SAP HANA Real Time Fund as well as further developing programs and strategic partnerships between our portfolio and SAP and the SAP ecosystem.  We are taking another step on a journey to build the next generation venture capital organization.  The venture capital landscape is in the process of a significant change, and we intend to lead that evolution with a differentiated approach,” said Nino Marakovic, CEO and Managing Director of SAP Ventures.

The increased commitment to the SAP HANA Real Time Fund was announced today at the SAPPHIRE NOW customer conference in Orlando, FL.

Since the SAP HANA Real Time Fund’s launch in mid-2012, SAP Ventures has made three direct investments to-date in innovative startups who have adopted SAP HANA and/or are focused on building real-time applications or solving big data challenges.  They include:

• Gild, a San Francisco-based provider of tech recruiting solutions to help organizations find developers skilled in the Big Data area.  Read more about Gild here:  http://www.gild.com/
• FeedZai, a Portuguese provider of real-time fraud detection and prevention solutions.  SAP Ventures co-invested with Data Collective, one of the ten VC Funds that SAP Ventures has committed funds to as part of the HANA Real Time Fund.  Read more about FeedZai here: http://feedzai.com/
• (The third company is based in Israel however we are not able to disclose their name at this time)

SAP Ventures has also committed funds to ten early stage venture capital funds, both here in U.S. and internationally.  A select sampling of some of those VC Funds include:

• San Francisco Bay Area Funds:
  • SV Angel – leading micro-fund known for investments like Evernote, Airbnb, Twitter and Square.
  • August Capital – leading early stage Sand Hill Road-based fund, known for Big Data investment in Splunk amongst other companies like Skype, Microsoft and Intuit
  • Data Collective – leading seed fund focused on investments in big data startups, from the infrastructure level up to analytics and applications. Portfolio companies include: Kaggle, MemSQL, Continuuity.
• International Funds: Berlin and Tel Aviv
  • Point Nine – Berlin-based seed fund with a focus on SaaS, marketplaces and mobile. The fund and its managers have backed companies such as Zendesk, Zend and DeliveryHero.
  • Magma – Tel Aviv-based Israeli seed and early stage fund, known for making early investments in companies likes Waze, DesignArts and GreenSQL.

In addition to the SAP HANA Real Time Fund, SAP Ventures also manages the SAP Ventures Fund 1, a $353 million direct growth fund initiated in 2011 that invests in innovative and disruptive growth-stage companies across the IT landscape, where a proven product and business model has led to demonstrated customer growth and scaling revenues.  Though SAP is not able to share more at this time, please stay tuned for exciting developments involving this fund in the coming weeks.

Over the past 15 years, SAP Ventures has invested in more than one hundred companies on five continents, including portfolio companies LinkedIn, Box, Violin Memory, Lithium and many others.  For more on SAP Ventures, please visit http://sapventures.com/

“With SAP HANA, we have embarked on a journey to continuously re-think and transform how we access, interact with and analyze data to answer any question of any complexity in real-time,” said Dr. Vishal Sikka, member of the Executive Board of SAP AG, Technology & Innovation. “Breaking down the unnecessary divide between OLTP and OLAP has only been the beginning. We will continue to re-invent real-time experiences by bringing the power of SAP HANA to more data varieties, sources and deployment options to enable enterprises to run as fast as our imaginations.”

Smarter Data Access for Hadoop and Other Heterogeneous Data Sources
SAP HANA smart data access is the data virtualization technology in SAP HANA that enables dynamic data queries across heterogeneous relational and non-relational database systems such as Hadoop, SAP Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (SAP Sybase ASE), SAP Sybase IQ and other third-party data warehouses. SAP is bringing the power of the SAP HANA platform to data virtualization, which will simplify data queries across heterogeneous sources while optimizing response time based on where data is stored and how it is used. SAP HANA smart data access helps customers build real-time Big Data applications with fast and secure query access to data across their business networks while minimizing unnecessary data transfers and data redundancy.

Spatial Data Processing for Richer Insights
SAP will further expand the SAP HANA platform with the introduction of new spatial data processing capabilities to combine geospatial data with business data, adding a new dimension to real-time business applications. Customers and ISVs will be able to process combinations of spatial, predictive and text analysis results within one SQL to simplify the development of intelligent, intuitive location-based solutions. Additionally, SAP HANA customers will be able to utilize geo-content at no additional charge, allowing customers to seamlessly develop and deploy spatially based solutions using native in-memory processing, mapping content and services.

These new spatial capabilities, content and services will particularly help industries that require real-time and mission-critical location solutions for planning, monitoring and analytics with a new level of performance and lower total cost of ownership (TCO). For example, energy infrastructure companies can use spatial processing capabilities in SAP HANA to identify and take action on high-risk pipeline components based on numerous variables in real time instead of days, thereby reducing potential outages, maintenance costs and risk of catastrophic failure.

Additional capabilities in the SAP HANA service pack will include:

• Extended natural language processing: Text mining capabilities in SAP HANA will be enhanced to support additional key languages for sentiment and core entity extraction, including Simplified Chinese for multi-lingual “voice-of-the-customer” analysis.
• Simplified predictive application development: Application function modeler in SAP HANA studio will enable model-driven access to native functions and predictive algorithms helping to enable rapid development.
• Integrated data provisioning and modeling: Unified data model and provisioning workbench for development and data acquisition simplicity in SAP HANA studio.
• Enhanced data services: Native extract, transform, load (ETL) solution with increased performance and new guided advisor to profile and assess the quality of incoming data.
• Enhanced disaster recovery feature: Introduction of new asynchronous and asymmetrical long-distance remote data center failover capabilities.
• Embedded interactive education: Pre-package referenced business application, data models, sample code, example data and data generators for interactive learning.
• Open hardware architecture for tailored data-center Integration: SAP plans to introduce an initiative to drive the availability and the openness of SAP HANA platform. This aims to include tailored data-center integration to provide customers the choice to integrate SAP HANA platform with customers’ existing network storage infrastructure. Additionally the initiative also aims to include the existing certification program for SAP HANA targeting third-party business intelligence (BI), ETL and backup and recovery tools.

Expanding Cloud Deployment Options

SAP HANA One, which was introduced a few months ago as a cloud offering, has gained more than 600 customers and provides the same leading capabilities as the on-premise SAP HANA platform. The new version of SAP HANA One is packaged with access to a trial edition of SAP Lumira software and sample public datasets to help analysts jumpstart their ad hoc BI projects in the cloud. SAP also announced the premium edition of SAP HANA One, the newest addition to the cloud-based offering that is available on SAP HANA Marketplace. The premium edition of HANA One is packaged with SAP HANA Cloud Integration to provide integration with SAP systems and heterogeneous sources. This edition is suited for existing SAP customers to run SAP Business Suite and SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse (SAP NetWeaver BW) applications or custom applications in the public cloud with an annual subscription contract.

Complete Integration With Sybase Data Management
SAP announced a roadmap on April 10, 2012, to integrate Sybase technologies into a coherent real-time data platform centered on SAP HANA. Today, SAP is announcing the completion of the integration of SAP Sybase ASE, SAP Sybase IQ, SAP Sybase Event Stream Processor (SAP Sybase ESP), SAP Data Services, SAP Sybase SQL Anywhere, SAP Sybase Replication Server and SAP Sybase PowerDesigner with SAP HANA.

• Enterprise-wide data modeling: SAP Sybase PowerDesigner in combination with SAP HANA will generate and share the necessary metadata to facilitate end-to-end data modeling support from planning to implementation.
• Extremely large data warehouse with integrated near-line store: SAP HANA and SAP Sybase IQ can now be combined into one logical database to SAP NetWeaver BW. Now customers can get both real-time in-memory processing and near-line storage with petascale data size.
• Added mobile synchronization: SAP Sybase SQL Anywhere, a mobile and embedded database supports bi-directional synchronization with SAP HANA across wireless networks.
• Integrated stream processing: SAP Sybase ESP is now integrated with SAP HANA allowing real-world integration to machine and event data.
• Real-time analytics for SAP Sybase ASE: SAP Sybase Replication Server is now enabled to connect SAP HANA with SAP Sybase ASE and other third-party databases allowing real-time analysis and reporting.

SAP HANA continues to push the boundaries of speed and innovation demanded by modern, real-time businesses. The open platform approach allows companies to more easily leverage SAP HANA to interoperate within their existing data center infrastructures. The latest enhancements to SAP HANA continue to provide additional value with smarter in-memory data virtualization, robust spatial data processing and simpler appliance architecture. By providing an open, integrated platform for core business applications such as SAP Business Suite, SAP NetWeaver BW and customer-built applications, SAP HANA empowers customers to run their business in real time within the window of opportunity needed to transact, analyze and predict instantly and proactively.

For announcements, blog posts, videos and other coverage during SAPPHIRE NOW, visit the SAP Newsroom.

SAPPHIRE NOW
With SAPPHIRE NOW, SAP offers its customers, partners and prospects even more opportunities to engage in dialogue with peers, participants and thought leaders around the globe. Being held in Orlando, Florida, May 14-16, 2013, this enhanced, real-time event connects attendees on site with global participants through state-of-the-art broadcast studios and an online experience that incorporates the latest social media and community functionality. Whether on site or online, participants can gain insight as to how SAP is delivering on its product strategy and helping organizations around the world to run better. For more information, visit www.sapphirenow.com. Follow SAPPHIRE NOW on Twitter at @SAPPHIRENOW and visit the SAP Newsroom at www.news-sap.com.

Note to Editors:
Webcasts, announcements, media roundtables, keynote presentations and blog posts from SAPPHIRE NOW will be available in the SAP Newsroom at: www.news-sap.com. To preview and download broadcast-standard stock footage and press photos digitally, please visit www.sap.com/photos. On this platform, you can find high-resolution material for your media channels. To view video stories on diverse topics, visit www.sap-tv.com. From this site, you can embed videos into your own Web pages, share video via email links and subscribe to RSS feeds from SAP TV. Follow SAP on Twitter at @sapnews.

For more information, press only:
Samantha Finnegan, (415) 377-0475, samantha.finnegan@sap.com, PDT

Cathrin von Osten, +49 (6227) 7-63908, cathrin.von.osten@sap.com, CET
SAP Press Office, +49 (6227) 7-46315, CET; +1 (610) 661-3200, EDT; press@sap.com

“There is huge potential in harnessing the power of SAP HANA to help drive business growth and innovation for SAP, our partners and our customers,” said Dr. Vishal Sikka, member of the Executive Board of SAP AG, Technology & Innovation. “We are working hand-in-hand with our partners and they are fully energized by the truly limitless opportunities SAP HANA can provide. We are seeing some impressive results across all types of partners, in the new applications they are building and in the new areas of growth they are driving with SAP HANA. Together with our ecosystem, we are able to deliver transformational value to customers of all sizes and industries. These customers can benefit from the ability to invent and adopt innovations easily, gain results rapidly, grow sustainably and power their businesses with SAP HANA in ways not previously imagined.”

SAP HANA is the fastest-growing product in the company’s history. SAP is working closely and intensively with developers, independent software vendors (ISVs), systems integrators, software resellers and startups on every front with enablement tools and resources to tap into the power of SAP HANA. Enablement support is provided for SAP HANA, including the SAP Business One application, version for SAP HANA, SAP Business Suite software powered by SAP HANA and is planned for the recently announced SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud. This is helping to open new sales, service and business opportunities for the entire SAP ecosystem, which benefits customers in the ways outlined below.

Multiple Deployment Options Available for SAP HANA: On Premise, in the Cloud or Both
SAP HANA can now be deployed in a number of ways, offering customers the freedom of choice to leverage the power of SAP HANA on premise, in the cloud and via other business models, such as hosting, application management and outsourcing services. SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud will aim to provide organizations with a new way to fully tap into the transformational power of SAP HANA as a service. At SAPPHIRE NOW, SAP has announced the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud partner program, which intends to provide participants access to enablement, best practices and other resources that are expected to prepare them for success. Initial partners that have agreed to participate in the forthcoming program include Accenture, Deloitte, IBM, itelligence, Savvis and Virtustream. To learn more see: “Partner Quote Sheet: SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud Partner Program.”

For optimal benefit from the on-premise power of SAP HANA, customers need the right hardware infrastructure to help speed innovation, run their business in real time,  achieve breakthrough results. Nine global technology partners have certified their solutions to run SAP HANA: Cisco, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, Hitachi, Ltd., Huawei, IBM, NEC and VCE. See the latest announcements issued by SAP partners in support of SAP HANA: HP, Hitachi Data Systems and SUSE.

Developers and customers can also access SAP HANA as a service through hosting, application management and outsourcing services offered via private cloud environments by leading SAP partners. Pre-configured with SAP HANA, these environments make it possible to develop applications built for SAP HANA in the cloud, which can greatly increase development agility. SAP HANA One database service in the cloud – powered by Amazon Web Services and available on AWS Marketplace – is a full-featured, small instance of the SAP HANA platform in the public cloud, available for productive and commercial use.

Enabling Resellers to Drive Adoption; Supporting Sales, Pre-Sales and Consulting Services
SAP channel partners play a critical role in helping organizations of all sizes identify, purchase, implement and run the ideal solution to address their unique business needs. SAP has engaged with partners from day one in an effort to accelerate adoption of SAP HANA by small businesses and midsize enterprises, helping them to benefit from this disruptive and transformational solution. Dell has announced it is now an SAP channel partner and will resell SAP solutions including SAP HANA.

For services partners and consultants, SAP is providing enablement support, helping them to ramp-up experts in sales, presales and consulting services for all types of companies and organizations. By the end of the first quarter of 2013, nearly 4,000 partner consultants have been trained in SAP HANA and more than 1,300 sales and pre-sales personnel within partner organizations have been trained in SAP Business Suite powered SAP HANA to help accelerate adoption by customers. During the first quarter of 2013, more than 50 percent of sales of SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA were generated by SAP partners, which remain critical for SAP to fulfill the market demand for solutions based on SAP HANA. And according to IDC, the SAP partner ecosystem made US$4.2 billion in revenue related to in-memory database offerings from SAP in 2012*.

View announcements issued by the following services partners in support of SAP HANA during SAPPHIRE NOW: Bramasol, Clarkston Consulting, Hitachi Data Systems, iGate, Neoris, smartShift, Secure-24 and Worksoft. It is important to note that not all of the news announced by these systems integrators is about services offerings for SAP HANA. Many announcements are actually about new solution offerings built on SAP HANA, highlighting the transformation of business for customers as well as for partners.

Startup Community Thriving on SAP HANA
The SAP Startup Focus program, launched in 2012, is growing, with over 400 startups joining from 19 countries to create new applications and products based on SAP HANA. Liquid Analytics, a startup focus program participant, uses predictive analytics running on SAP HANA. This helps its sales reps to more quickly respond to customers’ needs on the go. The applications developed by Liquid Analytics on SAP HANA use advanced forecasting algorithms and past order history to auto-populate products and quantities due for restock. This enables sales reps to fulfill orders on the spot, helping ensure that a wholesaler’s products are in stock on a retailer’s shelves, which helps accelerate sales and increase customer satisfaction.

“It was quite easy to engage in the SAP Startup Focus program, as SAP was operating as a startup itself,” said Vish Canaran, CEO, Liquid Analytics. “From the day we joined, it took us just one week to begin to experience tangible benefits, including making valuable connections with the right people. We’re a product company that builds applications, and SAP HANA has now become our platform on which to build Liquid Decisions for the store distribution market. With SAP HANA, Liquid Decisions provides real-time restock, cross-sell, up-sell and goal-related product recommendations to sales professionals. The information provides greater benefits to customers, helping them make decisions on the fly with real-time information.”

Core Mobile Inc., also a participant in the SAP Startup Focus program, offers a smart assistant solution for investment bankers and physicians called Corey. By running on SAP HANA, Corey can provide only the relevant information needed in real time from enterprise financial applications correlated with real-time market feeds and social media for financial advisors. It also provides physicians with instant access to patient information from multiple clinical systems, which is made available in real time when a patient calls into his or her physician’s office.

As SAP increases its commitment to the startup community, it is also more than doubling its capital commitment to the SAP HANA Real Time Fund – from an original 2012 commitment of US$155 million to US$405 million – to further support entrepreneurs and startups worldwide as they build their businesses on SAP platform technologies, including SAP HANA. Managed by independent fund manager SAP Ventures, the SAP HANA Real-Time Fund is intended to continue to foster and support an ecosystem of entrepreneurs and fund managers focused on the development of real-time applications and leveraging the power of big data as a driver of business value.

Additionally, SAP has taken the SAP HANA Marketplace to the next level, where individuals and enterprises can learn about, try and buy applications powered by SAP HANA, developed by and available from SAP, startups and ISVs. Integrated with the SAP Store, the SAP HANA Marketplace offers solutions not only for purchase but also a community where developers can exchange ideas and collaborate to develop new products. Solutions certified to run on SAP HANA in accordance with SAP integration standards earn the title “powered by SAP HANA.” As the portfolio of solutions in the marketplace grows, SAP plans to add additional functionality, such as RFP sourcing, developer and system integrator reviews, as well as infrastructure options for SAP HANA. View the following press releases issued by the first partners with solutions that are powered by SAP HANA: Choice, Pentland Firth and Tagetik.

A number of partners have signed OEM agreements with SAP — including Clockwork, PROS and Tagetik — to embed SAP HANA into their solutions. They are leveraging embedded analytics and the massive speed and scale of SAP HANA to help further unlock the power of their customers’ data and help enable optimized and innovative business processes. Please also see the following announcements issued by partners in support of SAP HANA from OpenText and Vendavo.

SAP HANA for Humanity Creates a Positive Difference
Building on collaboration with OEM partner Molecular Health to help enhance the quality of care for cancer patients, SAP has launched a program called SAP HANA for Humanity. Through this program, SAP is engaging with non-profit and governmental agencies to promote the use of SAP HANA to help solve pressing global problems related to issues such as climate change, healthcare and education. Organizations that SAP is engaging with through this program include BrightFunds.org, City of Boston, NSF Science and Technology Center for Coastal Margin Observation & Prediction, Stanford University and Water for People. Through the use of SAP HANA, SAP is teaming data scientists with high school students, helping them draw critical insights buried within large data sets. SAP is also engaging with high school students via the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP), a nationwide network of free college-preparatory public charter schools that serve underserved communities across the U.S.

ISVs Deliver Creative Solutions on SAP HANA
The SAP HANA Cloud Applications Partner program provides the enablement tools, benefits and support to facilitate building high-quality, disruptive applications focused on specific business needs – quickly and cost-effectively. SAP HANA has become a new platform for ISVs to develop transformational and disruptive business and consumer applications that are designed to change the way companies innovate and run their business. Launched in 2012, the program has grown, with over 25 partners participating in the SAP HANA Cloud program.  Signavio, an SAP HANA Cloud Applications partner, offers Signavio Process Editor based on the SAP HANA Cloud platform. Customers using the solution have access to a professional process-modeling platform that helps keep software quality and data protection high. It is the first application to achieve SAP-certified integration with SAP HANA Cloud and is available on SAP Store.

For announcements, blog posts, videos and other coverage during SAPPHIRE NOW, visit the SAP Newsroom.

Source: *IDC Infographic, sponsored by SAP, Ecosystem Analytics & Big Data: Growth Opportunities for SAP Partners, May 2013

SAPPHIRE NOW
With SAPPHIRE NOW, SAP offers its customers, partners and prospects even more opportunities to engage in dialogue with peers, participants and thought leaders around the globe. Being held in Orlando, Florida, May 14-16, 2013, this enhanced, real-time event connects attendees on site with global participants through state-of-the-art broadcast studios and an online experience that incorporates the latest social media and community functionality. Whether on site or online, participants can gain insight as to how SAP is delivering on its product strategy and helping organizations around the world to run better. For more information, visit www.sapphirenow.com. Follow SAPPHIRE NOW on Twitter at @SAPPHIRENOW and visit the SAP Newsroom at www.news-sap.com.

Note to Editors:
Webcasts, announcements, media roundtables, keynote presentations and blog posts from SAPPHIRE NOW will be available in the SAP Newsroom at: www.news-sap.com. To preview and download broadcast-standard stock footage and press photos digitally, please visit www.sap.com/photos. On this platform, you can find high-resolution material for your media channels. To view video stories on diverse topics, visit www.sap-tv.com. From this site, you can embed videos into your own Web pages, share video via email links and subscribe to RSS feeds from SAP TV. Follow SAP on Twitter at @sapnews.

For more information, press only:
Cindy McKendry, +1 503-231-7274, cindy.mckendry@sap.com, PDT
SAP Press Office, +49 (6227) 7-46315, CET; +1 (610) 661-3200, EDT; press@sap.com

ORLANDO

A test system, built from years of HP server technology innovations and optimized with the in-memory SAP HANA database for  SAP Business Suite, will be demonstrated for the first time at SAPPHIRE NOW, which is being held in Orlando, Fla., through today.

Unveiled last January, Project Kraken is a co-innovation effort between HP and SAP that focuses on SAP HANA, enabling customers to reduce the time required to rapidly transact, analyze and process large amounts of data within a single server.

Project Kraken’s goal is to provide customers additional choice in scalability for large, online transaction processing applications, with requirements for real-time analytical insights into this data. This allows organizations, including retailers, financial institutions, utilities and governments, another alternative to quickly detect patterns, analyze massive data volumes on the fly, and perform their operations quickly.

The prototype system, optimized with 16 Intel® Xeon® processor E7 family (codenamed Ivy Bridge-EX) central processing units (CPUs) and 12 terabytes of memory, has been engineered specifically for complex, data-intensive workloads. These include supply chain, customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP) and data analysis. HP and SAP chose Intel processors because of the company’s leading-edge technology that enables customers to improve system performance.

The solution leverages years of engineering and design across HP’s enterprise server business for customers that need the very highest levels of performance and availability, and where minutes of downtime can mean millions of dollars lost.

With this solution, customers can consolidate multiple online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytic processing (OLAP) databases into one vertically scalable server with improved performance. This will further the capabilities of SAP HANA, providing real-time analytics on transactional data, eliminating the need to spend time and resources moving data between environments.

“The combination of our best technologies—SAP HANA with HP Converged Infrastructure—revolutionizes in-memory computing to redefine the speed at which market leaders will soon operate, to speed transactions to a matter of seconds,” said Bill Veghte, chief operating officer, HP. “With the collaboration of HP and SAP, organizations can consolidate online transaction and analytic processing into one place and perform real-time analytics at never-before-imagined speeds, while competitors continue to move data between multiple environments to access meaningful insights at a far slower pace.”

HP, leveraging decades of engineering expertise of mission-critical systems, and SAP, with a focus on design of business-critical database solutions, are working together to create a marketable solution capable of scaling to the highest levels of memory within a single server for speeding business operations.

“With Project Kraken, HP and SAP are illustrating how customers can achieve a step jump in performance, while adding simplicity in the management of the environment,” said Vishal Sikka, member, Executive Board, SAP AG Technology and Innovation., “It shows how large enterprises can confidently run their enterprise applications, including SAP Business Suite, with growing quantities of data in shorter windows of time. This offering will fundamentally and forever change the database market.”

SAPPHIRE NOW
With SAPPHIRE NOW, SAP offers its customers, partners and prospects even more opportunities to engage in dialogue with peers, participants and thought leaders around the globe. Being held in Orlando, Fla., May 14-16, 2013, this enhanced, real-time event connects attendees on site with global participants through state-of-the-art broadcast studios and an online experience that incorporates the latest social media and community functionality. Whether on-site or online, participants can gain insight as to how SAP is delivering on its product strategy and helping organizations around the world to run better. For more information, visit www.sapphirenow.com.

Note to Editors: Webcasts, announcements, media roundtables, keynote presentations and blog posts from SAPPHIRE NOW will be available in the SAP Newsroom at: www.news-sap.com. To preview and download broadcast-standard stock footage and press photos digitally, please visit www.sap.com/photos. On this platform, you can find high-resolution material for your media channels. To view video stories on diverse topics, visit www.sap-tv.com. From this site, you can embed videos into your own Web pages, share video via email links and subscribe to RSS feeds from SAP TV. Follow SAP on Twitter at @sapnews.

About HP
HP creates new possibilities for technology to have a meaningful impact on people, businesses, governments and society. The world’s largest technology company, HP brings together a portfolio that spans printing, personal computing, software, services and IT infrastructure to solve customer problems. More information about HP (NYSE: HPQ) is available at http://www.hp.com.

Editorial contacts
Dayna Fried, HP
+1 949 422 7426
dayna.fried@hp.com

Chase Skinner, HP
+310 228 7929
chase.skinner@hp.com

Jason Loesche, SAP
+ 484 437 00 15
j.loesche@sap.com

www.hp.com/go/newsroom

ORLANDO —

Accenture
“Accenture is pleased to become a part of the SAP ecosystem for SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud. We believe that SAP HANA is a game changer for our clients, and offering the effectiveness of a private cloud combined with the power of SAP HANA will help enable us to bring more value to our clients quicker. This fits right in our sweet spot, given our private and public cloud offerings for SAP solutions and highlighted by our receipt of a 2013 SAP Pinnacle award as the Cloud Co-Innovation Partner of the Year.” – Eric Renouard, global lead, SAP Technology, Accenture

Deloitte
“Many companies — Deloitte included — have already invested in their futures with SAP HANA. As market adoption continues, SAP HANA in the cloud is an important new deployment option. We are pleased to participate in the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud partner program.  We expect to provide more options for our clients as they deploy SAP HANA to address their critical business needs.” – Craig Hodgetts, global leader, SAP Practice and Principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP.

IBM
“As part of our long-standing partnership with SAP, IBM expects that the combination of IBM’s broad portfolio of cloud analytics products and solutions, combined with the introduction of the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud will lead to a much faster and broader market adoption of cloud analytics by our mutual customers. Cloud-based analytics continue to drive a major transformation for clients around the world in delivering critical insight directly to business users.” – Jim Comfort, general manager of IBM SmartCloud Services.

itelligence
“Many itelligence customers have already embraced the benefits of the SAP HANA platform, but because one size does not fit all, they demand multiple deployment options. By joining the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud partner program, we anticipate that we will be able to offer customers ‘freedom of choice’ in designing the real-time, in-memory computing solution that’s right for them. We expect this to allow us to operate more effectively as a strategic advisor and help our customers to leverage the power of SAP HANA.” – Mark Mueller, chief innovation officer, itelligence

Savvis
“SAP HANA is designed to give businesses the powerful, real-time analytics capabilities to facilitate their success. Together with SAP, we empower these organizations with the global hosting infrastructure and long-time industry expertise to help them realize even faster time to market, lower total ownership costs and innovative performance for competing effectively.” – Jeff Von Deylen, president, Savvis, a CenturyLink company.

Virtustream
“The release of the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud will provide customers with multiple deployment options for SAP HANA: on premise, in the cloud or in a hybrid model. Going forward, running mission-critical SAP ERP, SAP CRM, SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse and new and unprecedented applications powered by SAP HANA will be possible in either deployment option. Together with SAP we are committed to providing our customers with immediate value resulting from innovative offerings.” – Rodney Rogers, chairman and CEO, Virtustream

For more information, visit sap.com/entcloud and the SAP Newsroom.

SAPPHIRE NOW
With SAPPHIRE NOW, SAP offers its customers, partners and prospects even more opportunities to engage in dialogue with peers, participants and thought leaders around the globe. Being held in Orlando, Florida, May 14-16, 2013, this enhanced, real-time event connects attendees on site with global participants through state-of-the-art broadcast studios and an online experience that incorporates the latest social media and community functionality. Whether on site or online, participants can gain insight as to how SAP is delivering on its product strategy and helping organizations around the world to run better. For more information, visit www.sapphirenow.com. Follow SAPPHIRE NOW on Twitter at @SAPPHIRENOW and visit the SAP Newsroom at www.news-sap.com.

For more information, press only:
Cindy McKendry, +1 503-231-7274, cindy.mckendry@sap.com, PDT
SAP Press Office, +49 6227 7-46315, CET; +1 610 661-3200, EST; press@sap.com

Keith Moody, vice president and chief information officer for Lexmark describes it as a “Partner Leveraged” model, (i.e. direct demand generation and channel partners) with solutions configured to customer needs. These custom-tailored hardware and software solutions became possible after a handful of smart acquisitions, including Twistage, an enterprise-level online video platform.

So now that Lexmark comprises hardware, software, services (managed and cloud) it required a better way to manage this new, dynamic business environment.

“It became very important for us to understand the lifecycle of our products and how it affects customers,” said Moody.

Enter a new SAP Analytics program at Lexmark involving SAP HANA and SAP BusinessObjects. How did the program fare? The snapshot below provides some of the expected and unexpected benefits – and lessons learned.

Moody said user learning and acceptance wasn’t an issue; learning the new database technology came faster than anticipated. In addition, the new analytics system allows Lexmark to look at all inventory parts on a global scale, something the company’s supply chain team wasn’t able to do before.

“The performance of the team increased dramatically because they were able to generate reports so much faster,” said Moody. “SAP HANA gave us the ability to respond much more quickly to business requirements.”

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This post originally appeared on SAP Business Trends.

New additions to the 9.0 version of SAP Business One available now include:

• Greater collaboration through Ariba, an SAP company: The application is now integrated with the Ariba Network. Customers can connect to the Ariba Network to manage more connections, with more buyers, across even more processes in a fully automated manner – all with direct integration to their SAP systems.
• Ease of implementation and upgrade: Customers benefit from a central location for implementation and configuration tools. Designed to support data migration from legacy systems, copying data between companies, this new feature helps speed up implementation and helps further reduce total cost of ownership.

• Simple adaption to company and industry-specific requirements: The application includes newly integrated development environments for partners, consultants and customer IT employees. The enhanced software development kit helps to extend the functionality of SAP Business One and to create industry and company functionality, and interfaces with third-party tools.

The 9.0 version of SAP Business One, version for SAP HANA, is planned to include:

• Easier add-on development for partners: SAP Business One offers a dedicated development framework for partners to enable native development and deployment of analytical applications powered by SAP HANA.
• New and enhanced business processes: By integrating operations in high-concurrent usage in real time with other business processes, such as invoice and delivery, SAP Business One speeds key transactions and improves visibility into cash flow. Fixed assets management, bin location management, multiple units of measurement and pricing and discounting reports are included to help customers enhance their business process management and improve bottom line.
• Real-time reporting and analytics: Pervasive analytics have been supplemented by predictive capabilities adding SAP HANA as the data source. Common reporting such as balance sheets, inventory turnover and sales analysis has been further accelerated. Embedded reports support a comparison of suppliers, prices and payment terms to negotiate better deals and realize cost savings.

“Without SAP Business One, MCS Business Solutions as our SAP partner and Boyum-IT as an industry-specific add-on provider, we would not have been able to handle our impressive growth for the last three years as profitably as we have,” said Axel Zimmermann, president, JAR Systems LLC. “The new release again proves that SAP continues to invest in adding necessary new features to help make our company run even more efficiently. We did not find this in any competitors’ offerings at this price point.”

“The new version of SAP Business One is well-suited for our company and the fixed assets functionality has been a major boost for our operations since we deal with lot of high-tech laboratory equipment,” said E.A. Subramaniam, CEO, HLL Biotech Limited. “The multiple units of measurement feature is another added advantage since it ranges from milligram to kilogram. The overall user experience has been wonderful in this new version.”

For announcements, blog posts, videos and other coverage during SAPPHIRE NOW, visit the SAP Newsroom. Follow SAP on Twitter at @sapnews and @businessonenews.

Media Contact:
Angelika Pfahler, +41 58 871-7216, angelika.pfahler@sap.com, CET

ORLANDO  —

“John Deere focuses each day on innovation, serving customers with breakthrough technology that enhances their productivity,” said Derek Dyer, director, Global SAP Services, Deere and Company. “As the first customer that went live with SAP ERP powered by SAP HANA, we aspire to improve our capability to make quicker decisions on design data, to gain real time insights on very large volumes of live data, and to see significant performance improvement in our new product introduction process. With these aspirations met, our next objective is to drive additional mission-critical processes in real time, provide self-service mobile connectivity to our business users and derive new business and IT value.”

Core SAP Business Suite applications powered by SAP HANA with industry extensions, available across SAP’s 25 industry verticals, accelerate processes such as promotion management for retail and consumer product companies, material planning for high-tech firms and spare parts management for auto manufacturers.

“Bringing the power of SAP HANA to mission-critical applications in the industries is just the first wave of incredible innovation we are delivering to our SAP Business Suite customers,” said Dr. Vishal Sikka, member of the Executive Board of SAP AG, Technology and Innovation. “The business transformation of joining the transactional world and analytical worlds is underway and with SAP HANA as the next-generation platform, the opportunities are endless.”

Breakthrough advantages of SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA for customers in all industries include:

• Smarter business models connecting real-time business insight and business transactions for innovative product and service offerings and operational models
• Broad variety of business scenarios, including marketing analysis, financial close, receivables management, consumer and social sentiment analysis, as well as the most used operational reporting and analytics, all specifically optimized to deliver the highest value to customers
• Simpler business interactions allowing business partners and consumers to integrate social media and unstructured data in a single system

Announced last week, SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud is also intended to offer a new option for customers to deploy SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA.

SAP and partners are helping customers plan, run and optimize implementation projects with rapid-deployment solutions that help save cost, accelerate deployment and minimize project risks. The SAP Solution Explorer tool helps customers identify relevant business scenarios and an initial selection of solution capabilities powered by SAP HANA. SAP customers and partners have embraced SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA: more than 130 customer shipments and more than 170 partner shipments reflect strong momentum and indicate a positive market reception since the initial launch.

For announcements, blog posts, videos and other coverage during SAPPHIRE NOW, visit the SAP Newsroom.

Media Contacts:
Janice Edman, +1 650 223 4817, j.edman@sap.com, PDT
Cathrin von Osten, +49 171 3363695, cathrin.von.osten@sap.com, CET

That involves innovating to do more with less. Running better can save firms three times what less efficient companies spend on finance costs, stated Narachewski, the vice president of Solution Management for LoB Finance. And it can result in 76 percent higher operating margins.

Representatives from satisfied customers Coca-Cola, ConAgra and Deloitte joined Narachewski on stage to share their stories.

Deloitte wanted to be more quick and nimble when responding to clients, customers and vendors. The New York-based professional services firm turned to SAP HANA, SAP Business Objects and other SAP solutions to solve several problems:

• Multiple points of contact for customers scattered across many formats
• Financial processes that ran for way too long
• Tax complications resulting from traveling employees

A bespoke SAP HANA solution solved the first problem, delivering every point of contact within a few milliseconds. Financial processes that once took up to six hours now execute in real time. Deloitte once had to estimate taxes based on a subset of its traveling population, but today can compare T&E for the entire firm for two weeks in less than one minute.

“It’s become so much more than a standard database,” Deloitte IT Leader Chris Dinkel said at SAPPHIRE NOW’s Finance Keynote on Tuesday. “There are so many functionalities, and they all work.”

Follow Derek on Twitter: @DKlobucher

This post originally appeared on SAP Business Trends.