Cloud Computing 101 - Hexagonal Clustering

Hexagon clustering is a technique to process geospatial data for identifying and visualizing things such as escape routes that avoid hazards in emergency situations or the optimal paths for utility pipelines that avoid restricted areas.

Developers can use it easily in new applications and combine it with other SQL predicates. Nobody other solution besides SAP HANA offers this capability, and it is laborious to implement it in other relational databases using the basic geospatial functions.

Why supporting Hexagonal clustering is important for SAP HANA customers? It allows to represent curvatures and is ideal for showing path connectivity or movement. It is extremely useful for all spatial data processing in all industries.

Real-World Examples: 

• Rescue management: finding evacuation paths and identifying evacuation zones. For example in case of a wildfire, you need to guide people from A to B, avoiding fire zones
• Trafficability: moving a battalion of tanks from A to B, without crossing risky muddy areas and woods.
• Utility grid planning: finding the right path for a new gas pipe, but you can't go underneath building, need to avoid protected lands and going over costly roads or rails.

Hexagonal clustering is a better way of getting insights from relational spatial data.  It assign geometries within free definable area to the identified hexagonal pattern. Using hexagon grids reduce sampling bias due to edge effects of the grid shape.

How SAP HANA uniquely supports Hexagonal clustering?
SAP HANA is the only database that offers Hexagonal clustering out of the box. 

SAP HANA clusters geocoordinates in a free definable area in an over-spanning grid of clusters in one SQL query. This can be combined with many other SQL features without coding (e.g. count(*), ST_UnionAggr, ST_Centroid, ST_Enveloper, …)) and runs on millions of coordinates in seconds.
Hexagonal clustering leverages SAP HANA spatial and graph capabilities.

Other exciting innovations to SAP HANA core spatial capability include:

• Memory footprint reduction by a factor 2 - To innovate faster and at a lower cost
• Open source support - SAP expanded support for geotools and geoserver: customers can now use free GIS systems instead of commercial GIS systems, expanding to new markets & targeting open source community. This is important and many GIS users prefer open source rather than commercial systems

How can the Intelligent Enterprise impact the hospitality industry?

Hospitality is changing rapidly. With evolving guest expectations and an unrelenting flood of data, hospitality’s digital horizon is disrupting classic distribution and guest stay models. Technology has become so interwoven with business strategies that the two are hardly distinguishable.

Technologies such as mobile devices and the Internet of Things (IoT) are
fundamentally redefining the way customers live, work, and play. Other innovations such as artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, and in-memory computing are opening up new playing fields and replacing traditional processes. For example, AI and machine learning are modernizing reservations, guest services, and operations. Meanwhile, consumer wearables, smart devices, virtual reality headsets, and online games are becoming points for brand interaction. It’s all happening at a breakneck pace.

Hospitality needs to act fast to stay ahead of the disruption curve. For example,
using the power of predictive analytics, hoteliers can now identify high-value guests, uncover profitable items and services to promote, anticipate demand, and manage inventory more effectively.

The Future: Priorities for Hospitality
Faced with a huge opportunity along with new market entrants, today’s hotel companies must focus on the right strategic priorities to drive digitalization across the business. By successfully embracing the opportunities offered by new technologies and addressing the following six strategic priorities, companies can lay the foundation for successful digitalization and stay ahead of the innovation curve.

• Own the Guest Journey with Enhanced Distribution and Shopping Models
• Transform the Guest Experience
• Digitalize the Workforce
• Unlock Business Value Across All Data Sources
• Enable Smart and Connected Hotels and Ships
• Drive Global Growth and Accelerate Brand Strategies with the Cloud 

Reimagine Hospitality
The digital economy offers infinite new opportunities.
In a connected world where every company is becoming a technology company, smarter products and services will refocus commerce on business outcomes and blur industry lines.

Own the Customer Journey

LOYAL CUSTOMERS WILL SHOP DIRECT - A digital and mobile world changes the way customers book travel. Based on changing behaviors, hoteliers are learning from retailers and adopting similar approaches with guests. Hotel companies that don’t adapt to digitalization risk being simply a supplier in the travel chain, leaving others, such as the Internet giants or new players entering this industry, to control the traveler conversation.

TRANSFORM THE SHOPPING EXPERIENCE - Offers have to be personal, contextual, relevant, and seamless, regardless of the touch point or device.
Hoteliers need to know their travelers and capture as much information as is available from internal interactions and social media data. They must use this data to create useful offers at the moment and location where they are most relevant. This retail approach is vital to have direct access to the traveler, expand reach in the guest journey, and increase revenues with ancillary products, partner products, and merchandising. Technological capabilities
enable this process.

BROADEN DISTRIBUTION MODELS - Distribution models are changing as the digital world requires new ways of selling. Powerful new digital players
are entering the travel market. Hoteliers want more control of the products and services they offer, whether they sell directly or indirectly. But mostly they want to own the guest journey and attract more travelers to buy directly from them. The ideal approach is to have a single view of available room inventory, amenities, promotions, descriptions, and rate plans across channels and third
parties while refining inventory to drive higher sales. This allows hotels to up-sell noninventory room items, meeting rooms, activities, and amenities. It’s a bit like supersizing a meal in a more personal way.

Drive Global Growth and accelerate brand strategy 

INCREASE BRAND VALUE - Build brand extensions by combining omnichannel commerce and digital technologies to move into new segment offerings. Configure and deploy new promotions and rate plans rapidly, and push distressed inventory to the direct channel of choice.

Unlock business value across all data sources 

ACCELERATE AND SIMPLIFY PROPERTY ACQUISITIONS -  To achieve a real-time view of data and system interoperability, your company needs a comprehensive platform approach. Cloud-based, standardized solutions enable hotel companies to innovate faster, manage master-data complexity efficiently, adhere to country regulations, and deliver quickly in the global economy. SAP can help you lead your organization’s digital journey and
address the challenges of data proliferation from enterprise data, Big Data, the IoT, and beyond. We can also help you transform all data – the foundation of a digital enterprise – into insight to drive innovation and create business value.

TRANSFORM ASSET MANAGEMENT - The platform approach enables real-time visibility into the condition of assets by measuring, predicting, and alerting when incidents occur. To do so, the platform links asset data to an intelligent asset network that provides performance benchmarking, up-to-date service documentation, and real-time visibility of spare-part replacements. The platform also connects asset data from OEMs, operations, and service providers – creating a collaborative solution for sharing asset information with business partners.

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SAP Demystified: Why is SAP HANA better than other traditional databases?

SAP HANA is an application that uses in-memory database technology that allows the processing of massive amounts of real-time data in a short time. The in-memory computing engine allows HANA to process data stored in RAM as opposed to reading it from a disk. This allows the application to provide instantaneous results from customer transactions and data analyses.

In-Memory First
SAP achieved a true transaction and analytical (i.e. translytical) platform by designing SAP HANA from the ground up with a new data processing architecture in mind.  This architecture greatly simplifies applications built on this platform removing many of the legacy overhead required to optimize applications on traditional disk-based database solutions.

SAP HANA is the only true in-memory columnar data store optimized for both high-speed transactional scenarios and also very fast query performance optimally supporting both OLTP and OLAP application scenarios. With SAP HANA, there is a single copy of data as there is no need to move data to external systems to offload analytic workloads or populate materialized views and in-memory caches to achieve acceptable performance.  This allows applications built on SAP HANA to process transactional and analytical workloads at high speed without any data duplication enabling businesses to have accurate insights based on the latest data.

Other solutions in the market typically provide an in-memory “option” to existing disk-based, row-oriented solutions, requiring a copy of data to be made into in-memory storage.  Row-based storages don’t yield the same level of data compression as columnar storages leading to higher costs and inefficiencies. These solutions may provide some performance improvements in certain use-cases, but they do not deliver the overall value that SAP HANA does by truly reducing the data footprint, increasing overall performance for all data and reducing management costs of the solution.

Scalability and Speed 
Based on the functionality of data being stored in a RAM chip instead of a hard disk, SAP HANA makes high speed processing a practical reality. Unlike the traditional process of data being read from the hard-disk and subsequently moved into RAM for data processing, the agility of SAP HANA allows organizations to achieve more with their data. For instance, an HR team could run real-time jobs in different batches without having to wait for the jobs to get completed before starting another. The fantastic capability of running multiple jobs at the same time and run them several times, if need be, gives SAP HANA an edge above the rest.

Simplicity
The biggest problem of traditional databases was their limitation of supporting and managing one business load at a given point in time. So, if a customer runs multiple businesses or has more than one line of operations such as marketing, customer support, logistics, manufacturing, finance, and more; the data in each of these systems will tend to get duplicated thus, increasing the complexity of the system manifolds. The process gets further complicated if the customer wants to view multiple kinds of data at one time. With SAP HANA integration, the simplicity of having one system for different business applications and its real-time access makes the operations extremely simple and user-friendly.

Predictive analytics and machine learning
Predictive analysis with SAP HANA includes native high-performance predictive algorithms for both expert and automated modes. Additionally, you can run open-source R scripts on SAP HANA through integration with R server and build machine learning applications with integration to TensorFlow. Some of the predictive algorithms run on streaming, spatial, and series data and are self-improving. The ability to perform predictive analytics on an entire body of transactional data lets you develop modern applications that forecast outcomes and help your business adapt processes in real time. Machine learning helps you build applications that can adapt and automate some of the manual business process step.

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Digital Transformation for the Insurance Industry with SAP powered by Approyo

Radical change in the insurance industry is occurring at a rapid pace. Changes in technologies, in business models, in standards, and in the makeup of insurance companies themselves require constant adaptation. Insurers must be able to respond to rapidly changing conditions yet still comply with all standards. How does a digital core with a true single source of truth help?

Responding to rapid changes
A digital core is an IT architecture that offers stability and long-term reliability for core enterprise processes yet also provides the flexibility to adapt quickly to new opportunities, challenges, and regulations. This solid foundation gives you a single source of truth, which, in turn, enables flexibility for innovation to accommodate new business models, new regulations, and new business events, such as mergers or acquisitions.

Simulation and analytics
The ability to respond quickly is an essential part of managing an insurance company. To do this, simulation, prediction, and analytical capabilities are important. Data is critical for gaining insight to make decisions. This insight must be at a granular level so decision-makers have the detail they need to understand trends, opportunities, and risks and quickly carry out what-if analysis using predictive algorithms.

Keeping data under control
Every insurance company needs the computing capability for carrying out complex risk assessments with large data sets to support timely, real-time analysis. Everyone in the company must have access to data they need, whenever and wherever they need it. They must also manage the enormous amount of data generated by connected networks to develop and deliver leading-edge products and services.

Addressing innovative opportunities
Customers in every industry are demanding innovation. Companies are responding with new products and services that better meet individual needs. These new offerings impact every facet of business, not just the front office. Companies must address end-to-end (E2E) processes across departments and lines of business to deliver on new customer experiences, products, and services.

The Intelligent ERP
Bringing SAP S/4HANA and SAP Leonardo technologies together as a digital core will result in a more flexible and intelligent enterprise. To achieve next-generation business processes, companies need an intelligent ERP solution that can be continuously enhanced and extended with innovative business services and applications built on emerging technologies, including machine learning, blockchain, and the Internet of Things (IoT). Insurance companies that have big innovation appetites or prefer to be early adopters have already begun this journey.

An End-to-End Intelligent Enterprise for Insurance
Insurance companies need to constantly innovate across their company value chain to drive profitable growth and adapt to how customers want to apply and pay for their policies and services. The capabilities delivered with SAP S/4HANA and the preconfigured, native integration with LoB solutions from SAP help ensure processes run smoothly and efficiently across the engagement lifecycle, allowing companies to drive sustainable revenue growth and maintain margins.

View the full post on www.approyo.com

Supply Chain in a Digital Economy

Digitization of the economy is continuing to accelerate the pace of innovation, shortening the product lifecycle and increasing the demand volatility. At the same time supply chains are becoming global and increasingly complex. To be in a position to create and capture opportunities, companies must develop an environment in which they can manage information and processes simultaneously across the extended supply chain. This evolution of supply chains is more connected, intelligent, responsive, and predictive.It enables companies to drive customer-centric processes and deliver personalized products uniquely built and delivered for the “segment of one.” These demanding customers have to be serviced across a business network of global partners that are increasingly challenged by resource scarcity. This transformation will continue to impact the business processes and systems that are required to remain competitive. It will change how we design, plan, make, ship, and operate our products and assets.

SAP S/4HANA Supply Chain, cloud applications such as SAP Ariba solutions and SAP Integrated Business Planning, and SAP Leonardo support a digital supply chain strategy with a digital value network that acts as an enabler for business transformation. The digital value network starts with a digital core that interconnects all aspects of the value network in real time to drive business outcomes. The digital core not only connects every aspect of internal operations but also enables real-time workforce engagement, supplier collaboration, outcome-based omnichannel consumer experience, and other market dynamics with Internet of Things (IoT) and Big Data scenario.

Predictive Forecasting and Demand Sensing
Short-term demand prediction with demand sensing algorithms. Remote capture and analysis of sensor data from connected devices and feeding to demand management process.

Demand Driven Material Requirement Planning
Dynamic planning of replenishments with DDMRP which is fully integrated into existing MRP concept.Replenishment only for real demand and introduction of  buffers at strategically important points.

Live Inventory Management
Live inventory management enabling unlimited simultaneous material movements and allowing for true transparency on inventory and material flows. Decreased stock buffers due to better transparency and insights.

Warehousing and Transportation on One Platform
Single warehousing platform for all warehousing operations, including optimization, automation, and labor management. Single transportation platform with basic and advanced shipping functionality and real-time embedded analytics.

View the full blog post on www.approyo.com 

3 Major Business Benefits of SAP HANA

SAP HANA provides a single in-memory data platform that supports both transactions and analytics on diverse data, a key requirement for applications supporting a modern, real-time digital business. In today’s digital economy, businesses cannot take action on stale insights, thus a true in-memory data platform should support real-time processing for transactions and analytics for all of a company’s data. This is a key differentiator of the SAP HANA platform against other traditional database vendors. Here are the top three benefits of deploying SAP HANA according to SAP.

In-Memory First
SAP achieved a true transaction and analytical (i.e. translytical) platform by designing SAP HANA from the ground up with a new data processing architecture in mind.  This architecture greatly simplifies applications built on this platform removing many of the legacy overhead required to optimize applications on traditional disk-based database solutions.

SAP HANA is the only true in-memory columnar data store optimized for both high-speed transactional scenarios and also very fast query performance optimally supporting both OLTP and OLAP application scenarios. With SAP HANA, there is a single copy of data as there is no need to move data to external systems to offload analytic workloads or populate materialized views and in-memory caches to achieve acceptable performance.  This allows applications built on SAP HANA to process transactional and analytical workloads at high speed without any data duplication enabling businesses to have accurate insights based on the latest data.

Other solutions in the market typically provide an in-memory “option” to existing disk-based, row-oriented solutions, requiring a copy of data to be made into in-memory storage.  Row-based storages don’t yield the same level of data compression as columnar storages leading to higher costs and inefficiencies. These solutions may provide some performance improvements in certain use-cases, but they do not deliver the overall value that SAP HANA does by truly reducing the data footprint, increasing overall performance for all data and reducing management costs of the solution.

Managing Data of All Sizes
Does it always make sense to have all data in-memory?  Realistically, this is not necessary. SAP HANA provides an innovative way to manage hot and warm data storage in an optimal way to strike the right balance between price and performance.

SAP HANA Dynamic Data Tiering provides multistore table partitions which easily allow a single table to span across memory and disk.  This greatly simplifies access to hot and warm data in consuming applications and greatly reduces the administrative effort to manage large data volumes. This provides for much lower total cost of ownership by reducing the amount of hardware needed, lower administration costs, and more efficient IT operations overall.

Foundation for a Modern Data Platform and the Intelligent Enterprise
SAP HANA is a modern multi-tenant in-memory platform to build next-generation Big Data, IoT, translytical, and advanced analytics applications. SAP HANA allows advanced analytics using a single data platform.  How is this done?

SAP HANA natively provides capabilities for machine learning, spatial processing, graph, streaming analytics, time series, text analytics/search, and cognitive services all within the same platform.  Applications on SAP HANA can provide real-time actionable insights from a wide-variety of data types.

Combining these innovative technologies with SAP HANA’s advanced application development, modeling and custom algorithm support inside the database layer, more business logic can be executed close to the data.   Specifically, SAP HANA’s support technology like stored procedures, business functions, core data services, rules framework, calculation views, and the application function library provide developers with a way to easily model complex data-intensive operations as close to the data as possible.  Most competitive solutions require that you copy the data between core data storage and other technology stacks to perform these advanced analytics on the data.

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The Journey to the Intelligent Enterprise with SAP powered by Approyo

In a consumer-driven digital economy, the pace of innovation is relentless. Change has never been this fast, but it will never be this slow again. Companies are beyond the stage of awareness when it comes to digital technologies. They already understand the power of Al, loT, cloud, robotics, and mobile, while others like blockchain and augmented reality are just appearing on the radar.

All of this innovation will be fueled by data, from having the right intelligence to execution. We are entering the era of intelligent mega ­processes, which start by combining the right data sets and converting them into intelligent insights. These insights then trigger automated transactions across the process. Leading companies that are making digital transformation a reality are putting data and intelligence at the center of their future. They are building new capabilities, skills, and technology, and evolving their culture to transform into an 'Intelligent Enterprise' and achieve the aforementioned outcomes. These companies are not only delivering short-term value to shareholders, but are also positioned to thrive and transform their industry.

However, executives are concerned about the path to digital transformation. Early adopters failed to understand their digital ambition and the complexity associated with transformation and are struggling on their journey. Successful companies that are engaged with SAP powered by Approyo are focusing on these five common capabilities:

• Reimagine end-to-end mega-processes - For example, customer experience is not just omni­channel, it's about orchestrating the entire value chain to deliver the best customer experience.
• Enhance enterprise intelligence through smart use of data and Al technologies.
• Run the world economy in real time by connecting industry value chains. For example, leverage end-to-end industry best practices, digital technologies, and SAP HANA to run in real-time
• Manage complexity by simplifying IT's operating model- Focus on clear IT strategy aligned to business priorities and a customer-first mindset.
• Accelerate innovation by moving to the cloud.

Why should your company start the path to digital transformation?

RUN VS. INNOVATE 
Executives struggle to strike a balance between the need to keep running a current profitable business and investing for future innovations. Quite often these two goals conflict, and most executives mistakenly focus only on the former and ignore the latter.

CORPORATE CHOLESTEROL 
The older the company is, the more stuck they are with policies, procedures, layers of management and risk aversion. Their own processes get in the way of change.

INNOVATION CULTURE 
Digital transformation is a journey without a destination. Companies need to build the right talent, skills, and partnerships to capitalize on digital opportunities.

COMPLEX IT INFRASTRUCTURE 
For an average organization with 30+ applications per billion of revenue, 70-80% of the IT budget is spent on keeping the lights on. It is difficult to manage data as a strategic asset and enforce master data governance across a fragmented portfolio. This means considerable value potential is untapped as companies cannot even use 1 % of the available data. Also, executives do not have the necessary visibility into operational and financial performance to manage quick course corrections.

These are complex issues and navigating through them requires change in attitude, mindset, as well as time. Companies that start now will have more time to address these challenges at their own pace.

Given the current speed of change, digital innovations have a short shelf life - today's breakthrough will become a 'me too' in a couple of years. Therefore, it is important to start now, build a foundation and realize value in a step-by-step manner instead of waiting for a proven stack of solutions and proven technologies with which to innovate.

With multiple mature solutions and design thinking led approach to innovation, SAP powered by Approyo is strongly positioned to help companies on their digital transformation journey, so they can become an intelligent enterprise. With the SAP HANA platform and our investments in Al technologies, we will exponentially increase the number of intelligent apps embedded in the Intelligent Suite over the next few years. These new innovations can be consumed at any time through the cloud, but will deliver value much faster if the modern foundation is in place right now.

Read the full blog post on www.approyo.com 

What is the SAP Intelligent Enterprise?

One of the most talked about topics at this years SAP SAPPHIRE NOW in June was The Intelligent Enterprise. This topic was  in nearly every keynote, speech and marketing material at the event. So what exactly is SAP's new strategy.

The next era of enterprise computing will be defined by intelligent technologies

For more than 45 years, SAP has been on a journey with our customers, helping them create value for their organizations by applying technology to solve some of their most complex challenges. In each era of enterprise computing, SAP has evolved our strategy – and product portfolio – so our customers can run better. In the 1960s and 1970s, as mainframe computing gained popularity, we enabled our first customers to automate their plant floor operations with material-requirements planning software. In the 1990s, as companies expanded their use of the Internet, SAP helped connect our customers’ headquarters with their subsidiaries through SAP R/3® software for enterprise resource planning.

And, over the past 10 years, as cloud computing and Big Data have become ever more pervasive, with SAP HANA software, along with SAP's extensive portfolio of cloud applications, has helped our customers begin their own digital transformations. Now, as technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, the Internet of Things (IoT), advanced analytics and blockchain become mainstream, SAP has a new opportunity – to help turn our customers’ businesses into intelligent enterprises, with new capabilities that enable their workforces to focus on higher-value outcomes.

Intelligent technologies will drive a next-generation value economy

Advances in machine learning are enabling algorithms to become highly accurate in natural language understanding and in image and speech recognition. Businesses can use these  increasingly sophisticated capabilities to  drive the next level of intelligent business- processes automation and eliminate  repetitive manual tasks.

Automation can now also be  implemented far more cost-effectively, because it is embedded more and more  within business processes. All of which  means that the workforce will be able  to focus on high-value activities like customer success, strategic planning, and innovation.

Advances in ubiquitous connectivity  and edge computing are creating a step change in business productivity.  This connectivity, coupled with artificial intelligence and machine learning, can  be used to analyze petabytes of data to affect real business outcomes.  IoT can connect the entire value chain,  from design to production to supply chain, and data-driven insights of customer  preferences can inspire better design, lower material costs, and reduce risk.

Real-time analysis of machines can predict maintenance needs, identify potential  quality problems in manufacturing  processes before they occur, and reduce  asset downtime by as much as 50%. The integration of advanced analytics  capabilities into applications allows  business users to analyze data on the fly  and informs better decision-making. Empowered users, benefiting from embedded analytics in business  processes, can get real-time visibility  into their changing environment, simulate the impact of business decisions, and achieve better customer outcomes.

Future business challenges will be radically different 

The global economic growth of the last nine years has been powered largely by technology. Record corporate profits and new business models can all be tied to technology-driven innovation. On average, an S&P 500 company is now being replaced once every two weeks. This “tumble rate” is accelerating – with the difference between winners and losers tied to their ability to embrace digital technologies. The next decade will, of course, bring about even greater tectonic shifts. To address these challenges, businesses need to make sense of a growing volume of data, create a step change in productivity, and innovate with relentless clock-speed. In other words, they need to accelerate value creation. This is the heart of the Intelligent Enterprise.

To help businesses become Intelligent Enterprises and achieve breakthrough outcomes, SAP provides three essential components:

Intelligent Suite - Will offer unparalleled, breakthrough business value. SAP provides intelligent, integrated applications that enable our customers to automate their day-to-day business processes and better interact with their customers, suppliers, and employees. These applications will be industry specific, global, and applicable to large enterprises and to small and midsize enterprises.

Digital Platform - Will enable data-driven intelligence and innovation.
With the SAP Cloud Platform and SAP HANA Data Management Suite, SAP will facilitate the collection, connection and orchestration of data, as well as the integration and extension of processes within the intelligent suite.

The Intelligent EnterpriseIntelligent Technologies - Will embed intelligence in applications and facilitate new co-innovations.
With SAP Leonardo, SAP will embed intelligent technologies in customers’ core processes, enabling them to use their data to detect patterns, predict outcomes and suggest actions. For customers who want to innovate even faster, SAP solutions will offer industry innovation kits and open innovation services, which apply design thinking methodologies to new business models by industry.

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The Cloud Helpers Blog Series - Sandbox as a Service

Welcome to our blog series, The Cloud Helpers. This series will focus on cloud computing topics and help you understand how the cloud can impact your business today and in the future. Today we are going to focus on one of the most buzzworthy things from 2018 and will impact businesses everywhere in 2019 and beyond: Sandbox as a Service.

What is Sandbox?

A sandbox is a type of software testing environment that enables the isolated execution of software or programs for independent evaluation, monitoring or testing.

In an implementation, a sandbox also may be known as a test server, development server or working directory.

Additionally, the sandbox technique is implemented in information security to evaluate suspicious software or files containing malicious code. Typically, the source code of sandboxed software is not tested prior to isolation, which reduces unexpected behavior.

Cloud Sandbox or Sandbox as a Service

Cloud Sandboxing are self-contained infrastructure environments that can be configured to look exactly like the final target deployment environment, but can be created and run anywhere. For example, developers can create a sandbox that looks like the production environment - from network and hardware to OS versions and software to cloud APIs. They do their development in that sandbox for a short period of time and when they are done they tear down the sandbox.

SAP Sandbox as a Service - Powered by Approyo

As an SAP Certified Partner, Approyo will provide a custom SAP Sandbox Server to your needs in our Private Cloud. This solution is called Ignite.

Ignite delivers your team the solution you need and the services to enable continuous and effective use of SAP HANA to meet strategic and daily needs of business operations. The cloud solution provides the services and tools that enable you to minimize the cost and risk associated with having the SAP HANA systems up and running.
Why Approyo

• Fast deployments with no capital expense.
• Ability to scale based on your business needs. No need to purchase more capacity than what is required. 
• Your SAP applications get the benefits of a dynamic cloud infrastructure - making them behave more like cloud native applications. 

Developing a project? Our Cloud Ignite sandbox-as-a-service provides a hosted SAP HANA sandbox, for as long as your team needs it, for a fixed monthly fee.

Read the full blog post on www.approyo.com

Transform Consumer Products with SAP Powered by Approyo

The retail and consumer goods industries will change more in the next 10 years than they have over the past 40. One primary force is responsible—digitalization—and it has already begun.

• Consumers demand more than just a product – they expect an outcome.
• Consumers change buying decisions in the moment based on newly received information.
• Only real-time, collaborative networks have the ability to deliver meaningful consumer experiences.

These trends have one major thing common: They pose a threat and open new opportunity. The decisive movers will take advantage of these opportunities and turn them into competitive advantage.

SAP Solutions powered by Approyo
SAP HANA powered by Approyo is at the center of what makes digital transformation possible, and let’s you thrive in this unprecedented era of digital transformation. It is by far the best enterprise platform-as-a-service option for SAP customers. 

SAP HANA can help consumer products companies’ knowledge about consumers and aids in creating a 360 degree picture of what motivates consumers, and what will help them on the buying journey. It helps extend the user experience to multiple devices and easier interfaces. SAP HANA extends your existing analytics into something more powerful and meaningful on a one-to-one level. It can help you extend your existing business into the exciting new world of Internet-of-things and leveraging new technology like beacon and sensor data. And SAP HANA extends the collaboration possible at every link of the value chain.

SAP HANA intigrates your cosnumer products and related systems into one cohesive system allowing you to leverage the resulting synergies.  With SuccessFactors and Fieldglass you can staff up contingent workforce as needed for that busy holiday season. Directly tie your existing inventory management solutions with SAP Ariba and so on.

Finally, with the velocity of change now possible in the digital era, you can build new solutions and business models in a rapid manner.  You can quickly build solutions and efficiently combine them such that they will not impact existing business models.  And this can be done in weeks and days instead of years or months. 

Once you understand how you customers want to be treated,  make sure your systems and process allow exactly that: Extending your Cloud and On-Premises Apps let you tailor your current applications to differentiate your customer engagement.

• Extend your current cloud apps to add new features and personalization unique to your brand, its people and goals
• Easily modernize your current on-premises applications into beautiful, mobile-ready assets your team and customers can use right now
• Deploy pre-built app extensions created by SAP and our partners to quickly and easily achieve results in new outlets, markets and geographies

REIMAGINE CONSUMER ENGAGEMENT 
Nowhere is the impact of digital more profound than in processes and technologies that directly touch consumers. A great omnicommerce consumer engagement must include:

• Knowledgeable store associates armed with as much or more information than consumers 
• Social engagement involving brand, employees, and consumers 
• In-store technologies to augment shopping experience 
• “Segment of one” merchandising, marketing, and loyalty 

REIMAGINE BUSINESS MODELS
If technology was not a limitation, how would you fundamentally change business models based on real-time and complete consumer and business data? Many possibilities exist, such as:

• Automated, dynamic, and contextual pricing based on a consumer’s digital footprint 
• Flexible supply networks enabling short lead times and “make-to-order” assortments 
• Tracking and tracing along the supply chain with connected warehouses 

REIMAGINE PROCESSES
With digital playing a larger role in commerce, it’s easy to envision new processes that help create and capture new sources of value. Examples include:

• Data and insights help not only in growing the core business but also in creating new businesses that directly monetize data 
• Business networks and marketplaces are enabling agile fulfillment
• The ability to activate hyper-local execution 

Read the full blog post on www.approyo.com

Your Business Powered by Approyo

Digital business is built on new computing infrastructure – the pillars of mobile, cloud, Big Data, and analytics – accelerated by the Internet of Things (IoT), advances in machine learning, and innovations like blockchain. These disruptive technologies are giving companies the ability to radically change business models and create new products and services.

At Approyo, we see enormous potential for you to simplify your own businesses and seize new opportunities through the SAP HANA platform, with SAP S/4HANA as your new enterprise suite. Plus, SAP Leonardo, built on SAP HANA, works seamlessly with every SAP application making them more powerful, intelligent, and capable.

In today’s digital world, companies’ need to:

• Reduce complexity in business processes and simplify technology
• Deliver end-to-end outcome-based business solutions
• Ensure that the best business results are delivered

SAP Powered by Approyo
Approyo provides full SAP service technology with extensive capabilities in consulting, solutions architecture, and product procurement, in order to develop the right solution for our customers. Our extensive partnerships in the industry allow us to offer top-tier SAP procurement and logistics to meet all our customers’ SAP technology needs.

TRANSFORM SALES WITH SAP powered by Approyo 
SAP solutions powered by Approyo enable companies to substantially enhance, simplify, and visualize the entire sales process.

TRANSFORM PROCUREMENT WITH SAP powered by Approyo
SAP solutions powered by Approyo enable companies to substantially enhance, simplify, and visualize the entire procurement process from sourcing to purchasing to settlement.

TRANSFORM HR WITH SAP powered by Approyo
SAP solutions powered by Approyo enable companies to drive a Digital HR
Transformation and deliver new and innovative solutions to meet the rapidly evolving business needs, turning promise into purpose.

TRANSFORM MANUFACTURING WITH SAP powered by Approyo
SAP solutions powered by Approyo enable companies to integrate and embed intelligence in manufacturing processes facilitating Industry 4.0 principles with one source of live information.

Download the new Whitepaper at www.approyo.com

Approyo Named One of the 10 Best Cloud Solution Providers of 2018 by Industry Era

Approyo is proud to announce it has been named one of the 10 Best Cloud Solution Providers by Industy Era.

Approyo was nominated and selected by Industry Era annual comprehensive review process. Industry Era's editorial team analyzed approximately 500 companies that provide cloud solutions and are at the forefront of tackling customer challenges. From that list, 25 companies were shortlisted and reviewed by a distinguished panel comprising of CEOs, CIOs and analysts, including the Industry Era editorial board, who ultimately decided the final top 10.

Industry Era is a technology magazine that features and talks about the enterprise solutions that can play a key part in redefining the business goals of organizations.

“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.”

View the full profile: https://www.industry-era.com/vendor-2018-cloud-the-SAP-experts.php 
View the Magazine: https://www.industry-era.com/magazine/cloud-march-2018/
10 Best Cloud Solution Providers list: https://www.industry-era.com/vendor-2018.php

Read the full announcement on www.approyo.com 

What's new in SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 03

SAP recently announces the upcoming release of SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 03 planned for April 2018. Read the official announcement from SAP for the full details. Here are some of the major highlights from this exciting release.

SAP HANA 2 is the business data platform for the intelligent enterprise. Leveraging state-of-the-art database and data management technology, advanced analytical capabilities and intuitive application development tools in the only all-in-one, in-memory-first data platform – SAP HANA 2 frees up valuable resources and human capital for new and innovative application development to meet your business’s strategic objectives.

SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 03 includes a mix of new and continuous innovations across the themes of database management, data management, analytical intelligence and application development.

• Database enhancements allow for advanced data and privacy protection. Improvements for high availability/disaster recovery (HA/DR) will further increase system availability and help protect enterprise-critical applications. Enhancements in the areas of multi-tenant database container (MDC), dynamic tiering, workload and performance management and analysis further improve performance and usability.
• Data Management enhancements include new data integration and federation sources with additional supported data types to bring you a broader view of the business. Enhanced and simplified functionality helps you to further improve the quality of your data.
• Analytical Intelligence enhancements further increase execution performance and productivity for data scientists as well as extended features that will allow you to gain the most insight from geocoding your business data. Improvements for graph support more complex analysis and scenarios for your connected data. And new sentiment analysis for additional languages means you can cover larger markets with text analysis.
• Application Development and Tool enhancements simplify development, improve performance, expand use cases and enable a new class of security for applications. Additions to officially supported runtimes in XSA provide more options for your application server layer of development.

Read the full announcement on www.approyo.com 

Transform Sales with SAP Solutions powered by Approyo

The digital economy is changing your customers’ buying behavior. Living in a world where sensors, artificial intelligence, and social structured and unstructured data flows are just one click away, customers expect individualized products and a unified buying experience on any device. Digital technology is changingthe game,and companies that adopt new sales and distribution strategies are changing the rules. To   succeed, companies need to streamline their front end processes - marketing, sales, commerce, services, and billing, to drive value and optimize customers’ experience across every channel of interaction. Leading companies are learning what new technologies can do for their sales and distribution organizations.

There is a step-change in the cost and effectiveness of distribution and billing processes. Your customers expect shorter and more reliable delivery times for goods, and much simpler ordering, invoicing, and payment processes. At the same time, they expect more individualized products and services; for certain industries, this individualization has reached a lot size of one. The additional complexity that this level of personalization causes in sales and supply chain processes can be resolved only through an integrated, real-time technology platform such as SAP HANA.

SAP S/4HANA enables substantial increases in the productivity of your internal sales workforce. Additionally, it enables unified multichannel e-commerce and flexible billing for B2B and B2C businesses with business network collaboration. It provides detailed insight into action summaries and increased automation tailored for the internal sales representative. Integration between SAP S/4HANA Sales and the SAP Hybris sales solution enables your sales teams to work together as a well-oiled machine and equips your sales people with tools to sell anytime, anywhere, on any device. SAP Hybris delivers the agility and power to find answers, engage in meaningful customer conversations, and deliver the right impact every time. Companies can now connect every part of the business and provide every business unit with the information they need to create the best, most consistent, and most targeted customer experience.

Reduce Sales-Related Costs by providing real-time and contextual analytics to improve process performance
Give the sales team a complete view of the sales  process and facilitate ad hoc collaborations to  accelerate sales decision-making related to  contracts, pricing, and negotiation.

Reduce Inventory-Related Costs through live inventory visibility, optimal allocations, and agile response 
Simplify and visualize processes related to order fulfillment tracking. Use instant communications between key stakeholders to take actions immediately and reduce cycle times. Respond quickly to unforeseen events, such as delayed shipments or changes in customer orders, through increased inventory visibility. Improve order fulfillment and allow for inventory optimization along the supply chain and across warehouse locations.

Reduce Days Sales Outstanding by supporting wider billing scenarios and automated tracking of account receivables
Enable faster billing with reduced administration. Introduce flexible and dynamic search capabilities of the customer invoice list and tracking real-time orders and accounts-receivable status through the integration of CRM with contract-to-cash cycles. Leverage automated subscription  billing to speed up processing times, and enable new business models.

Increase Market Share, Share of  Wallet, and Customer Satisfaction by 
providing a holistic view of customer information
Gain a single view of the customer and enable better engagement along the buying journey, including data from Web streams and social channels, past  interactions, propensity scores, and “in-the-moment”  interactions.

Read the full blog post on www.approyo.com 

Approyo featured on SuperbCrew.com - Simplifying SAP Solutions for All Businesses

Approyo CEO Chris Carter recently sat down with the folks at SuperbCrew to talk about the SAP ecosystem, the future of SAP and Approyo and where the industry as whole is going. To read the full interview, please go to www.superbcrew.com.

Here is an excerpt of the interview:

Q: Chris, tell us more about your solutions?
A: Approyo provides full SAP service technology with extensive capabilities in consulting, solutions architecture, and product procurement, to develop the right solution for our customers. Our SAP HANA Solutions are typically up and running within 2 – 5 days. Our SAP HANA solution, Ignite, encapsulates SAP HANA’s various components into one neat and easy package. Companies have the freedom to either use the entire package or specific components.

Q: You’ve recently been recognized as one of the Rising Entrepreneurs of the Year by The Technology Headlines; could you tell us something more?
A: This was a great honor and a great way to start off 2018. I owe a lot of this honor to my staff and company who helped make 2017 a very special year. This award really shows how much the company and myself has grown and matured throughout the last several years. I’m expecting even better and bigger things in 2018!

Q: Approyo has also been ranked 47th among Top 100 Cloud Services Providers; what does it mean for you and how hard was it to get where you are today?
A: The ranking further solidifies our strategy and mission to become the leading global SAP Cloud Centric Solution provider. It’s not a question of “if” a company will move to the cloud anymore, it’s a question of “when” and “how”. This shift in thinking has helped us reach many clients who need to move their SAP environments to the cloud. When Approyo started, we really had to educate companies about the cloud. After many years of doing this, we are seeing the reward and we are viewed as a trusted advisor.

Q: What are your plans for the future?
A: Growing! Every day I feel we and our staff are growing. We always want to be help and support our customers. We want to grow and help our customer get to the next level.

More about SuperbCrew
SuperbCrew is a business news website covering innovative technology and internet companies – sharing news, experience and knowledge from the tech and business world.

SuperbCrew community connects innovative companies and journalists.

See your business clearly with SAP HANA

You swim today in exploding amounts of data from internal and external sources. Keep afloat by taking advantage of the integrated data quality, data integration, and data virtualization capabilities of SAP HANA, a next-generation platform for in-memory computing. Help simplify your IT landscape and enable successful information management for all your analytical and operational implementations.

DELIVERING TRUSTED, COMPLETE, AND RELEVANT INFORMATION
Job one in the 21st century is digital transformation. But how exactly do you become a digital enterprise? At SAP, we designed SAP HANA to help you harness the latest digital technologies in the service of these overarching goals:

• Faster time to insight and action with real-time analytics
• Improved operational efficiency and productivity
• Agility to respond to rapidly changing market conditions
• Simplification of the IT landscape with integrated capabilities

Managing your valuable information successfully is the key to thriving today. With the data access, integration, and quality capabilities of SAP HANA, you can deliver immediate and targeted insight, so all stakeholders can act in the moment and make quick decisions based on complete, timely, and accurate data. You can also streamline processes to make your operations more efficient and effective – from your inner core outward to the edge of your global business network, including cloud platforms, mobile devices, and the Internet of Things. And you can seize fleeting moments of opportunity, reimagine long-standing business models, and create radical new sources of value that propel you to a leadership position in your industry.

Data Federation: Query data remotely – without moving it
Give information workers instant access to all of your organization’s data – with SAP HANA smart data access technology. Federate queries on remote data sources – including Hadoop, SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise (SAP ASE), and other databases. And retrieve relevant answers without the cost and effort of migrating data.

Data Integration and Replication: Deliver data from anywhere, when and where it's needed
Maintain business continuity with data that is always available. With SAP HANA data integration capabilities, you can move data across multiple sources and targets to satisfy a host of business needs. Ensure high availability and disaster recovery, make informed decisions based on the latest information, and more.

Our smart data integration technology also provides a single user interface for real-time data replication in batches or in real time. It offers pre-built adapters to common data sources and an SDK adapter that lets you get data from any source – for a 360-degree view of your business. 

Data Quality: Improve data quality and reliability
Deliver accurate, trustworthy data to decision makers – with SAP HANA smart data quality. Manage quality issues across all domains and sources, and cleanse data with SAP HANA. Now you can standardize, validate, and match entities – names, titles, phone numbers, e-mails, and more – to ensure accuracy. You can also use geocoding to enrich address data with location intelligence.

Remote Data Sync: Make your data available remotely
With SAP HANA remote data synchronization, you can bi-directionally synchronize data between SAP HANA and thousands of SAP SQL Anywhere databases – whether embedded in devices or located at the edge of your network. You can make enterprise data available to remote workplaces or locations beyond the reach of high-bandwidth connections. And you can collect and analyze remote data to monitor devices at distant locations – enabling your entire business to be more responsive.

Rethink the Possible with SAP HANA

Why SAP HANA? Capabilities include database services, advanced analytics processing, app development, data access, administration, and openness. The benefits? SAP HANA helps you manage data in a single in-memory platform – so you can take action in the moment. Accelerate the pace of innovation and run live in this new digital economy.

Database Services
Take action in the moment by using in-memory database services to process high-speed transactions and analytics. Manage large database volumes using multitenant database containers and dynamic tiering across multi-tier storage.

Analytics Processing
Gain new insights from advanced analytics processing in SAP HANA. By leveraging  in-memory data processing capabilities – text, predictive, spatial, graph, streaming, and time series – you can get answers to any business question and make smart decisions in real time.

App Development
Develop next-generation applications that combine analytics and transactions, and deploy them on any device. Take advantage of best-in-class development tools – and deliver personalized experiences with the right data served at the right time for users.

Data Access
Gain a complete and accurate view of your business by accessing data from any source – internal or external. Access data where it’s located, integrate or replicate relevant data into SAP HANA, and ensure data quality to increase confidence in decision making.

Administration
Simplify system administration and IT operations with tools that help you monitor processes, ensure data and application security, and achieve continuous availability. Keep your business running smoothly and effectively – from any device or location.

Security
Keep your communications, data storage, and application services secure with robust identity and access management controls. Rely on best-in-class software security, patching, and encryption – and use a dashboard to monitor all KPIs related to security. 

Innovation needs Digital Transformation. Approyo can help!
Don’t let the new digital world pass you by. Approyo can help your company deal with the changing world. Our SAP S/4HANA and Big Data solutions address these important questions and more. Let us show you today! Set up a free consultation.

What are some of the most useful features of SAP S/4HANA?

Run a truly live business with SAP S/4HANA, an in-memory ERP suite available in the cloud or on-premise. SAP S/4HANA is the digital core that enables your business to take complete advantage of the Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data, real-time analytics, mobile, business networks, third-party systems, and more.

SAP S/4HANA is the digital core – the nerve center – of your entire business. It consolidates internal and external elements into a single, living structure that goes beyond traditional ERP software. In other words, it connects all of your processes, provides you with live information and insights, and seamlessly integrates your enterprise with the digital world at large.

• MODULARITY - Unlike the traditional monolithic approach, SAP S/4HANA enables best-of-breed architectures and combination of solution components in different ways.
• HYBRID CLOUD - All SAP S/4HANA components can be deployed either on premise or in the cloud.
• INTEROPERABILITY - Hybrid cloud enables a different integration approach, with better, deeper API layers.
• PLATFORM - Full integration with the Cloud, allowing applications to be built faster and cheaper.
• OPENNESS - More ways to leverage data from business transactions and client interactions.
• FLEXIBILITY - More options for architecting and developing integrated solutions.

Try SAP S/4HANA today

Don’t let the new digital world pass you by. Approyo can help your company deal with the changing world. Our SAP HANA and Big Data solutions address these important questions and more. Let us show you today! Set up a free consultationhttp://www.approyo.com/.