The Intelligent Enterprise powered by SAP HANA

The SAP HANA business data platform is unrivaled, combining a robust database with services for creating innovative applications. It enables real-time business by converging transactions and analytics on one in-memory platform. Running on premise or in the cloud, SAP HANA untangles IT complexity, bringing huge savings in data management and empowering decision-makers everywhere with new insight and predictive power.

Accelerate with Simplicity
An intelligent enterprise requires a business-ready data platform that helps you find the signal in the noise and unleash your data’s potential for better business outcomes. The SAP HANA business data platform provides the next-generation data management foundation for all of the industry-leading SAP® solutions. It also enables development of cutting-edge applications to deliver intelligent solutions for the enterprise quickly.

SAP HANA is one of the first data management platforms to handle both transactions and analytics in-memory on a single data set. It converges a future-proof database with advanced analytical processing and capabilities for application development, data integration, and data quality. Embedded in a robust, state-of-the-art security framework, it supports compliance with the latest security standards and data protection regulations. You gain a single secure environment for all your mission-critical data assets. You can manage large volumes of structured and unstructured data efficiently, leveraging the value of your business data while improving total cost of ownership (TCO).

Reimagine the Database
SAP HANA is built on an in-memory columnar store that is optimized for both transactional and analytical workloads, enabling the benefits of multicore processing, modern storage technology, and the single-instruction, multiple-data instruction set. It’s fully compliant with requirements for the atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability (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 application server tiers.

Multitenant databases can be managed as one while maintaining their isolation from one another. The data tiering capabilities of SAP HANA, such as extension nodes, allow you to maximize your value by balancing performance and cost of data storage. This enables administrators to control which data is kept in-memory and which is kept in alternative persistent data storage. At the same time, the multistore tables in SAP HANA mean that where and how data is stored is completely transparent to consuming applications.

Act with Live Intelligence
SAP HANA provides next-generation hybrid transactional and analytical processing (HTAP) with the broadest advanced analytics capabilities to help business leaders understand information in context and achieve situational awareness to act in the moment. This includes native high-performance predictive and machine learning algorithms and integration with TensorFlow and R to reveal meaningful patterns in data and build applications that can learn and automate manual business processes. Text analysis and search capabilities help extract real insights from unstructured textual data in many different languages. Administrative boundary content, advanced services such as geocoding, and spatial services available in the cloud help accelerate development of location-aware business applications.

SAP HANA can store and query streaming data from sensors, plant equipment, and Internet of Things devices; time-series data such as price fluctuations and information on machine efficiency; and highly interconnected graph data. It also provides a JSON document store. These powerful capabilities can be leveraged with standard SQL, enabling data to be combined from standard relational databases, spatial and graph data, and data stored in a JSON document. A wealth of new possibilities helps you reimagine business models.


Innovate with Confidence
To achieve business insight in real time, SAP HANA helps you innovate with confidence. You can analyze sensitive data while effectively aligning with compliance requirements with real-time data anonymization. State-of-the-art techniques such as k-anonymity and differential privacy render personal data disconnected from an individual. This empowers business users and data scientists to “know without seeing” and explore new business opportunities for data as a service.

SAP HANA connects with existing applications using open standards and offers a choice of ways to build applications that are Web based or based on microservices. SAP Web IDE for SAP HANA offers a comprehensive lightweight tool set for data modeling and application development. Complex security authorizations can be easily shared between native applications and extensions running on SAP HANA and SAP business applications.

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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.

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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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