Tuesday, July 31, 2018

Unlock business value across all your data sources with SAP Leonardo

In today’s digital economy, anywhere from 60% to 73% of all data within an enterprise goes unused. Like many organizations, you may be collecting information on a massive scale. But are you realizing the true power of Big Data?

SAP Leonardo Big Data capabilities are the answer to the challenge of making the most of your Big Data, providing solutions for easily ingesting, storing, processing, and sharing petabytes of information. SAP Leonardo customers gain more powerful business value from their data, with rapid deployment, greater scalability, faster analytical processing, and more powerful sharing across the enterprise than ever before.

In the past, gaining business value from Big Data faced three challenges:
  1. Where to keep the data?
  2. How to process diverse, unstructured data types?
  3. How to unify the enterprise information architecture with Big Data environments?
This resulted in counter-productive enterprise siloes and expensive, time-consuming manual solutions for sharing information. SAP Leonardo Big Data solutions offer you a superior approach. The comprehensive lineup of Big Data offerings reduce complexity, overcome silos, and help you get value from the diversity of today’s enterprise data.

Rapidly ingest huge amounts of diverse data
Digitally connected businesses are receiving unprecedented amounts of data across a growing number of sources, at variable speeds and in different formats – from operational logs and social media to Internet of Things (IoT) and machine learning touchpoints. To use this data effectively, you need to be able to quickly ingest it. It’s the first, crucial step to applying insights to real-time business decision-making. And it can be one of the most challenging to handle. Until now. SAP Leonardo Big Data solutions quickly acquire, store, transform, and share data from every source, including relational databases, enterprise data warehouses, and Hadoop resources. In addition, we provide you with critical tools for data cleansing, quality, and transformation using machine learning, graph computation, and stream processing, giving you the ability to utilize refined data in real time.

Ingestion functions for Big Data processing are handled by an array of SAP solutions across enterprise and Hadoop data. You also have the option to use open source solutions for ingestion to the SAP Distribution for Hadoop software. SAP ingestion solutions let you ingest data to an SAP HANA stack or to Hadoop, depending on analytics requirements.

Store massive datasets from across your enterprise and beyond
The SAP Leonardo Big Data offering delivers massive scale for your growing data, organizing petabytes for ready analysis. This Hadoop-as-a-service computing solution is known as SAP Cloud Platform Big Data Services. It provides a scalable, cloud-based Hadoop data store, Spark complement, and a full Big Data platform environment for storage and processing.  Cloud deployment lets you get started rapidly, process much larger volumes of data at a lower price, and scale volumes quickly and easily. The SAP offering uniquely includes operational services to ensure consistent and reliable performance. This is a must for enterprise production environments. In addition to the cloud-only approach, there is also an option for a hybrid model.

Further, in combination with SAP HANA, SAP Cloud Platform Big Data Services delivers native multi-temperature management for hot or cold data virtualization and schema extension capabilities. And with the ability to federate data from any source, it reduces data movement and speeds response times.

Get comprehensive insights faster with combined analytics
With the SAP Leonardo Big Data solutions, getting business value from combined data is no longer a daunting challenge. Our unified, yet flexible, in-memory architecture simplifies the process of refining and cleaning diverse types of data to enable your business analytics to keep pace with the variety and velocity of business demands. SAP Vora is a distributed computing solution deployed on Apache Hadoop and Spark clusters that provides integration with SAP HANA, so you can quickly and easily run combined analytics across enterprise and Hadoop data.

All SAP Vora operations can be accessed, executed, and extended through SAP HANA. SAP HANA and SAP Vora act as a single system, with joint query optimization and automatic storage decisions. SAP Vora runs on Big Data clusters separate from your Hadoop data. It provides specialized analytical processing for different data formats. The computing engines are designed to run high-performance sophisticated analytics against relational, time series, graph, and JSON data.

Understand every facet of your digital enterprise
The SAP Leonardo Big Data solutions bridge the Big Data value gap by processing diverse data types to make them collectively useful for accelerating your organization’s processes and decision making.

As a result, our customers can thoroughly analyze and understand every aspect of their business, including customer behavior, operational behavior, market behavior, and beyond. They feed that insight into new experiments, forward-thinking innovations, and better customer relationships.The comprehensive approach of SAP Leonardo’s Big Data solutions, combine data ingestion, storage, processing, and sharing to fuel holistic digital transformation. Our data management services encompass diverse data sources, types and endpoints, and accommodate cloud, on-premise, and hybrid deployments for ultimate customization to your organization’s needs.

Unlock insights and intelligence across your entire enterprise to imagine new business models, develop new supply chains, create new customer interactions, and be outstanding. Only with SAP Leonardo Big Data.

Read the full blog post on www.approyo.com

Wednesday, July 25, 2018

Accelerate your digital transformation with SAP Leonardo

The world is becoming increasingly digital, presenting limitless opportunities. But the paths to innovation are many. Which path can deliver the best outcome for your business? Whether it’s accessing decision-making insights, reducing manual labor, or delivering more personalized services, SAP Leonardo is here to help you determine the right innovation answer. You already know you need to take a digital approach to your business. The challenge is knowing where to begin. With SAP Leonardo powered by Approyo, you have a team of experts to work directly with you, contributing their guidance, skills, and expertise to help you produce market-ready solutions to your business challenges. SAP Leonardo leverages technology such as analytics, Big Data, blockchain, data intelligence, machine learning, and IoT, together with industry expertise in enterprise software to rapidly unlock breakthrough innovation at scale

SAP Leonardo is a systematic approach to digitally transform businesses, focused on repeatable solutions to well-understood business problems across many industries. SAP Leonardo accelerates and de-risks digital transformation using proven methodologies and pre-integrated software components. It brings together award-winning design services, an industry-leading cloud platform and applications, deep expertise in business processes, and the most innovative new technologies, such as analytics, Big Data, blockchain, data intelligence, machine learning, and IoT.

Innovate – With proven SAP Design Thinking methodology and Industry Value Network experts, the Approyo team focus on understanding your business priorities, processes, and people. We then work with you to build a business case, prototype, and blueprint that address your greatest opportunity or top challenge first. There’s no technology-first approach nor massive-scale projects without a clearly achievable mandate.

Integrate – We help you implement your project with next-generation technologies – including analytics, Big Data, blockchain, data intelligence, machine learning, and IoT – that infuse exponential transformation into your day-to-day operations. These technologies are built upon and integrated into the digital core of your business using SAP Solutions powered by Approyo.

Scale – Through SAP Leonardo, we enable you to scale digital transformation across your entire organization in a step-wise, systematic way. You can implement tactical projects knowing they build upon a broader organizational strategy and a united, integrated platform. You can begin your journey with applications optimized for SAP Leonardo as well as industry and IoT accelerator packages with a fixed price or open innovation services.

Read the full blog post at www.approyo.com 

Thursday, July 19, 2018

SAP HANA in-memory and Digital Transformation

Digital transformation is a top priority. IT systems must adapt quickly to technologies and business models that arise at a dizzying pace. Let the SAP HANA platform replace complex systems and isolated applications to help you transform IT. It supports modern applications that help you reimagine business processes and deliver real-time insights from data that’s always fresh.

SAP HANA is one of the first data management platforms to handle both transactions and analytics in-memory on a single data copy. It combines a state-of-the-art database with advanced analytical processing, application development capabilities, data integration and data quality. You gain a single secure environment for all your mission-critical data assets, so you can manage large volumes of structured and unstructured data efficiently to reduce total cost of ownership. At the same time, you can simplify your  IT landscape and reduce administrative effort by consolidating multiple workloads onto SAP HANA. Being able to Run Simple helps you deliver insight into ongoing transactions, so your organization can respond in real time to market change, seizing new opportunities more quickly than your competitors. And you can develop innovative applications on SAP HANA that combine transactions and analytics and deliver engaging personalized experiences over any device.

Reimagine your database
SAP HANA is built on an in-memory columnar store that optimizes the benefits of multicore processing and the single-instruction, multiple data instruction set. It’s fully compliant with requirements for atomicity, consistency,  isolation, and durability (the ACID standards).

Intuitive modeling tools and preconfigured function libraries let you run complex business logic directly inside the database. That means you avoid latencies from moving data between the database and the application servers. Stored procedures take advantage  of optimized in-memory calculation engines  to run faster.

When you set up multitenant database containers, you can manage several databases as one while maintaining their isolation from one another. You can perform administrative tasks such as backup and patching on all tenants at once and optionally allocate resources to each tenant separately to protect performance. You can handily meet service-level requirements while lowering capital and operating costs.

With multistore tables in SAP HANA dynamic tiering software, you can keep frequently accessed data in-memory while moving rarely accessed data to disk, managing Big Data economically without the constraints of memory size. Applications can access data independent of storage location, and you can modify storage preferences whenever demand changes.

Accelerate analytics exponentially
With in-memory processing, you can run  on-the-fly aggregation, eliminating the need for pre aggregates, materialized views, analytic indexes, or database accelerators. Business users can quickly retrieve high-level summaries and also drill down to granular details.

SAP HANA includes native high-performance predictive algorithms and integration with Microsoft R Server to reveal meaningful patterns in data that help you create predictive models. Text search and text analysis extract meaning from semistructured text and transform it into a data model for analysis. SAP HANA provides native support for spatial data – points, lines, and polygons – and spatial functions. Base maps in SAP HANA – with political boundaries and points of interest – help accelerate development of location-aware business applications.

You can also process and analyze streaming data from sensors, plant equipment, the Internet of Things, or financial transactions with SAP HANA. Series data processing helps you store and query time-series data like price fluctuations, seasonal trends, and information on machine efficiency and network flow. Finally, SAP HANA can store highly interconnected graph data in a dynamic data model.

SAP HANA is a single platform for building applications that combine text analysis, spatial analysis, predictive analysis, and graph data processing on the same live transactional data, streaming data, series data, and data from external sources. A wealth of new possibilities helps you reimagine business models, design new services, and expand into new markets.

Optimize data access, integration, and quality management
SAP HANA offers functionality to manage data virtualization, quality, and synchronization, so you can retrieve and use data inside and outside your organization with unprecedented ease.

With smart data access, you can federate queries to external data sources such as other databases, Apache Hadoop, and Apache Spark to perform queries without costly data movement. When you need to move data across SAP HANA and multiple data sources, smart data integration can help you do so to support informed decision making with complete  visibility. With smart data quality, you can validate and match entities such as names, phone numbers, and addresses to help ensure accuracy. Finally, features for remote data synchronization help you synchronize data bidirectionally among databases in SAP HANA and the SAP SQL Anywhere® suite that are embedded in devices located beyond the reach of high bandwidth connections. That means you can synchronize devices at distant locations and shorten response times across the enterprise.

Read the full blog post... 

Wednesday, July 18, 2018

Finance with SAP S/4HANA

Enterprises today are increasingly experiencing a new normal of volatility that is  fundamentally changing how they engage with their investors, customers, suppliers, regulators, and employees. This volatility is driven not only by traditional areas of currency exchange risk and commodity prices but also by macroeconomic volatility and rapidly changing consumer and employee preferences. Additionally, tax policy volatility and complex regulatory requirements are challenging finance to capture, analyze and provide deeper and more relevant real-time information.

The role of finance itself is evolving towards active engagement with business partners, simplifying and automating processes, enabling new questions to be asked that were never possible and delivering new insights during the decision-making process. Leading finance organizations are driving digital transformation and fundamentally changing the way they bill, collect, report, and pay taxes, and how they plan for and manage a constantly changing business. Finance’s role is expanding as it leans into innovation to creatively adapt to change, manage volatility, and to find new opportunities to create value.

SAP S/4HANA is the finance innovation platform that enables today’s digital business by bringing business processes and analytics together into a single, smooth, digital motion. It provides the foundation for continuous innovation by allowing customers to benefit from newest SAP Leonardo innovations as they emerge along with the ability to leverage extended finance for procurement, workforce management, travel & expense management, etc. The time to innovate and transform is now and SAP supports a live business for all roles of the office of the CFO.

SAP S/4HANA for central finance foundation
Provides a non-disruptive path to adopt SAP’s latest finance simplifications and innovations for customers with heterogeneous landscapes, out-of-maintenance, and/or highly customized SAP systems. It provides a unified financial and management platform to centralize process execution, planning, and reporting based on the same (single source of the truth) data. Benefits include advanced reporting at the segment, entity, or group level; business-model-agnostic rollups for reorganizations and M&A modeling; scalable local and central process execution (complementing process execution in source ERPs); and a starting point for finance shared services across business units.

Transformation platform for the digital enterprise
Create an advanced digital data architecture (universal journal), a platform to include future innovations, a single source of the truth for both transactions and analytics, and a digital core to include integration for workforce, network, customers, and new innovations enabled by SAP Leonardo, SAP Ariba, SAP Concur, SAP SuccessFactors, and SAP Field glass solutions.

Rapid value creation with minimal disruption
Massive simplification and optimization within SAP S/4HANA can be deployed with minimal business disruption to accelerate business value and capture and eliminate the need for overly complex processes.Additional value can be achieved by deploying solutions and templates within our SAP Activate methodology, standardizing master data using the SAP Master Data Governance application, and focusing effort on the reduction or elimination of legacy custom code.

 Read the full blog post on www.approyo.com

Thursday, July 12, 2018

Mid-year review – 2018 Technology Predictions from Approyo

Every year, the team at Approyo puts together a few predictions for the upcoming year. We published our original predictions back at the start of 2018 and now that we are half through the year, we thought we would revisit these predictions.

IT predictions for 2018

  • Cloud First - It's not a question of "if" the Cloud and more. Companies of all shapes and sizes need the cloud to innovate in a digital world. You can't be on the sidelines anymore and 2018 is the year to fully embrace the cloud. 
  • Everything as a service - Traditional business products are being re-imagined as services.
  • AI and Machine Learning - Creating systems that learn, adapt and potentially act autonomously. SAP introduces SAP Leonardo this year that has many features for AI and Machine Learning that can help companies today. 
  • Security – As we mentioned in our first bullet point, the cloud is the new normal. Your data is one of the most important aspects of your business. Cloud and hosting partners will need to continue to adapt security measures to protect this valuable information.

Observations from the first half of 2018
Through the first half of the year, the Cloud continues to be more and more important. One of the major themes from this years SAP SAPPHIRE NOW conference was that the cloud is the foundation to achieve the intelligent enterprise through SAP Solutions.

Additionally, security continues to be an important topic throughout the year and into the future. As your company continues to create more and more data, securing that data becomes more important. That’s why we recently announced a new partnership with Bohh Labs. BOHH Labs brings an easy to implement service that acts as a layer between the user/ application and the back-end data store. BOHH enables total security on all stored data by uniquely providing database or specific file security, removing it from the source and storing it separately without changing the structure, enabling prioritization and control of sensitive data. BOHH’s security service provides full text search capabilities, even on secured data, and supports Bot technology for data to be conveniently accessed through keyboard, text-and-type from any device and voice commands to enhance the access flow to data within the system. This means sensitive and non-sensitive data residing in SAP HANA can easily be searched at once in real-time to extract valuable analytical insights without putting sensitive data that must stay protected at risk by hiding it away for access by authorized users only.

Data also continues to be an important trend. We already talked about the security side of data, but another important aspect is how companies are using that data. Another major focus on SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018 was how companies need to implement the right technology foundation in order to use all the data they are producing in an intelligent way. This will continue to be an important trend for the rest of the year and beyond.

Read the full blog post on www.approyo.com 

Monday, July 9, 2018

Approyo named one of the 30 Most Valuable Tech Titans of 2018 by Insights Success

Approyo is excited to announce it has been named one of the 30 Most Valuable Tech Titans of 2018 by Insights Success.

Insights Success is a platform that focuses distinctively on emerging as well as leading companies, their confrontational style of doing business and way of delivering effective and collaborative solutions to strengthen market share. This magazine talks about leaders and orators from the world of technology, which includes CEOs, CIOs, VPs, managers and other professionals who had set a benchmark in the revolution of the industry.

“We are honored to be part of this great list of companies" said Christopher Carter, CEO of Approyo. "This achievement continues to validate our success in the SAP and Cloud marketplace.”

“Upon Review of the nominees listed in The 30 Most Valuable Tech Titans, 2018, with consideration of aspects such as prolificacy in the application and delivery of technology, provision of all-encompassed solutions and services, and an ambitious global ascension, Approyo has excelled pertaining to its complete SAP service technology in consulting, solutions architecture, hosting and managed services, in order to develop the right solution for its customers,” asserts the Editor-in-Chief of Insights Success Magazine, Pooja M. Bansal.

View the full profile: https://www.insightssuccess.com/approyo-customer-centric-sap-cloud-solutions/

30 Most Valuable Tech Titans of 2018 list: https://www.insightssuccess.com/the-30-most-valuable-tech-titans-2018-may2018/

Read the full blog post on www.approyo.com 

Insights Success Magazine
Insights Success is a forum where top leaders and executives talk and share about their experiences, views, and mantra for success which will help the young and dynamic bloodline of professionals to learn, cater and deliver business needs for customers in order to become futuristic market leaders.