Although energy companies are not usually thought of as green, it is core to TXU’s business model to help customers reduce electrical usage so that they remain the preferred energy partner. Currently they are exploring a green button initiative to provide detailed data to customers through the web or on their mobile device so that they can monitor and reduce their energy usage.

Wanting to connect to their customers more closely is driving greater innovation and customer connection. With SAP Document Access by Open Text, TXU is ensuring customer issues can be solved in one call by making sure call center agents can see the exact document a customer is calling about.  Under consideration is expanding communication channels to include email and SMS. TXU feels these innovations will continue to increase employee productivity and foster stronger relationships with customers.

By implementing a solution through SAP Afaria and Sybase Unwired Platform that captured sales data in the device, and then replicating it, it eliminated re-keying to the system. Sales employees’ productivity increased as well as their satisfaction. CIO, Keith Moody, commented, “IT doesn’t normally get positive responses, but with this approach we did.”

Enabling service representatives with mobile devices that provide real time information on the customer’s equipment is currently being explored. With up to date information on hand, service representatives could ensure they had the correct parts with them and finish their work onsite in less time, increasing customer satisfaction.

As customers look for more services from their printing equipment, Lexmark has acquired five companies to provide new solutions. By having their mobile strategy in place, Lexmark will be able to offer new solutions more quickly and easily to the market.

Customer Central Newsroom

First, here’s more, taken from the news release:

SAP Sales and Operations Planning is a next-generation planning application, powered by SAP HANA, designed to help companies become more demand-driven by enabling them to rapidly translate demand fluctuations into actionable plans for manufacturing, procurement, and logistics. With this new cloud-based solution, companies can engage stakeholders from sales, marketing, finance, supply chain, and other functions in a truly integrated and collaborative planning process that aligns their business to most profitably meet future demand.

In a recent blog (The Perfect Storm is Forming for Sales and Operations Planning), I wrote about the complexity of today’s global supply networks, and increased importance of technology to effectively manage and leverage the big data volumes now available from structured and unstructured sources. We are also seeing the need for increased collaboration across these global networks and the need for speed in sensing, analyzing, simulating and profitably responding to the business dynamics. And at the eye of the proverbial storm: Global supply chains and the Sales & Operations Planning processes that drive them.

SAP Sales & Operations Planning brings together the real-time computing power of SAP HANA and the social collaborative paradigm of SAP Streamwork to enable:

• Planning, using a unified model of demand, supply chain, and financial data – which can be analyzed in real-time at any level of granularity or dimension
• Rapid simulations and scenario comparison on complete, detailed S&OP model against multiple criteria such as demand fluctuations, product mix changes, and capacity constraints
• Collaboration, using an embedded, context-aware social platform that helps accelerate planning and decision-making across the organization

These capabilities delivered by SAP Sales and Operations Planning empower companies to more profitably align demand and supply, position themselves more effectively to drive revenue growth and identify opportunities to reduce supply chain costs.

To learn more about SAP Sales and Operations Planning check out this short overview video and click on the following link.

Follow me on Twitter @howellsrichard

ORLANDO —

“SAP HANA is seeing widespread adoption and customer success. With SAP HANA SP4 we continue to raise the bar on breakthrough performance and extensive scale,” said Dr. Vishal Sikka, member of the SAP Executive Board, Technology & Innovation. “We are committed to an open real-time platform for developers and end-users and will continue to provide this non-disruptively to our partners and customers.”

Service Pack 4 for SAP HANA Now Generally Available
With the SAP HANA platform, customers can easily add new capabilities with service packs instead of costly upgrades. The newest service pack for SAP HANA also offers native text searching capabilities on structured and unstructured content, seamless and optimized interoperability with the R open-source statistical environment and additional in-database predictive and business functions for rapid deployment and faster processing. SAP HANA also expands the interoperability of platform support for “big data” by providing interoperability with the open source Apache Hadoop technologies. 

• Native text searching: The additional native predictive and business functions within the SAP HANA database allow for developers, partners and customers to build powerful and fast predictive applications on the platform. Native text searching on structured and unstructured content offers the ability to procure, process, model and search text content directly in the real-time SAP HANA database, so results can run lighting fast and be called by business intelligence (BI) tools, applications or the forthcoming, planned SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analysis software. The functions can also be easily implemented, resulting in rapid application deployment and faster development. Several SAP business applications, such as SAP Smart Meter Analytics software, and partner solutions utilize these functions for fast in-database predictive processing.
• R interoperability  with SAP HANA: Furthermore, the interoperability of R with SAP HANA opens up all the statistical functions available in one of the world’s most popular open source projects to business analysts and data scientists who want to use the power of the SAP HANA platform. This new interoperability relies on a highly optimized and secure connection between SAP HANA and R to solve business-critical problems in real time. Analysts and developers can quickly and easily connect to and call R functions from within SAP HANA and make the results available for consumption by end users within seconds.
• Interoperability of SAP HANA with open source Apache Hadoop:  SAP Data Services software will provide capabilities to use Hadoop as a data store and be interoperable with the “big data” Hadoop framework.
• In addition, this service pack supports the general availability of the SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse (SAP NetWeaver BW) application, which has become the most successful early adoption program in SAP history.

SAP HANA Now Available for Developers on Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Developer instances of SAP HANA are now available on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform. For the first time, developers can get access to the ground-breaking in-memory technology from SAP through a highly-scalable and low-cost infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). Developers who sign up are able to run their own pre-configured HANA instance to create their data analysis application. Along with a host of third-party development tools already available on AWS, this compelling and attractive solution is a major step for SAP to build-out the global ecosystem of SAP HANA developers. Developers can sign-up through the “SAP HANA Developer Center” page of SAP Community Network.

“SAP HANA on AWS for developers is an important milestone in our relationship with SAP,” said Terry Wise, director, Worldwide Partner Ecosystem, Amazon Web Services. “With this offering, we are providing customers the ability to begin developing enterprise business applications leveraging the power of SAP HANA in a matter of minutes. The large scale in-memory capabilities on our scalable, flexible, pay-as-you-go platform will reduce the barrier of entry for many developers.” 

Startup Focus Program Enables Further Innovation on SAP HANA
The SAP Startup Focus program is designed to enable startups to innovate on SAP HANA as their underlying platform of choice. The ten startups currently in the accelerator program focus on areas as diverse as social media analytics from NextPrinciples and Passenger, to industry-specific solutions from Optessa, Nexvisionix, Basis Technologies and AlertEnterprise. Space-Time Insight and Ankhor Software offer new ways of visualizing data while Zettaset offers an integration solution for SAP HANA and Hadoop. For specific reports, the performance improvements the startups have seen with SAP HANA have ranged from 300 times to cases as extreme as Taulia’s, which managed to reduce risk analysis business process from two to five days to under three seconds.

These startups are showcasing their applications at SAPPHIRE NOW onsite in the “SAP HANA Test Drive” area. To further underscore the company’s intention to deliver SAP HANA as a platform for development, the SAP Startup Focus program is closely aligned with the new US$155 million “SAP HANA Real-Time Fund” to identify and foster such startups on an ongoing basis. For more information, visit the SAP Startup Focus program page on sap.com. 

SAP Defines New Benchmark for SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse
In order to reflect evolving customer requirements which demand greater ad-hoc query capabilities on real-time data, SAP has developed a new standard application benchmark for the SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse (SAP NetWeaver BW) application called the enhanced mixed load (EML) benchmark. This standard performance benchmark is the first to provide a standard performance measurement of near real-time, ad-hoc analysis and reporting on continuously updated data.

HP is the first partner to deliver a certified result for this new EML benchmark. This benchmark showcases the ability of SAP NetWeaver BW on SAP HANA running on HP AppSystem for SAP HANA, to exceed customer expectations for high-performance analytics with near real-time data sets. For a detailed independent white paper describing the testing environment and business value, visit experiencesaphana.com. 

SAP and HP to Help Organizations such as Hilti Corporation to Rapidly Deploy Large-Scale solutions on SAP HANA Platform
SAP and HP have partnered to help companies process and analyze higher volumes of data from business-critical applications to drive innovation with HP AppSystems for SAP HANA. The new scale-out solution of HP AppSystems for SAP HANA is a pre-integrated, tested and supported converged system featuring servers, storage, networking and management software. It is the first enterprise-class real-time analytics solution optimized to run SAP business application workloads while offering a completely automated failover mechanism for high availability and disaster tolerance technology. It includes HP ProLiant BladeSystem BL680c servers and the HP X9300 IBRIX Network Storage System with HP P6500 Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA).

Hilti Corporation, a leading provider of technology for the global construction industry, is one of the first organizations planning to run 30 terabytes of data from SAP NetWeaver BW powered by SAP HANA on the HP AppSystem for SAP HANA.

“SAP and HP are helping Hilti to provide better customer service and develop innovations in the global construction industry with SAP HANA and HP Converged Infrastructure, said Christian Ritter, head of Performance Competency Center, Finance, HR and Reporting, Global IT, Hilti. “We look forward to deploy our 30 TB of SAP NetWeaver BW on the SAP HANA platform and benefiting from SAP and HP’s close collaboration in scale-out architecture.”

To help organizations implement their roadmaps for SAP HANA in a more timely and cost-effective manner, HP and SAP are partnering to develop new rapid deployment solutions for SAP HANA.

“Exabytes of digital information are created, captured and replicated every day around the world, making it complicated and time-consuming for organizations to manage and exploit the data,” said Martin Fink, senior vice president, Business Critical Systems, HP. “With HP AppSystems and rapid-deployment solutions for SAP HANA, organizations should be able to achieve real-time insight from their data, speeding and simplifying the decision-making process across the enterprise.”

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

SAPPHIRE NOW
With SAPPHIRE NOW, SAP offers its customers, partners and prospects even more opportunities to engage in dialogue with peers, participants and thought leaders around the globe. Being held in Orlando, Florida, May 14-16, 2012, this enhanced, real-time event connects attendees on site with global participants through state-of-the-art broadcast studios and an online experience that incorporates the latest social media and community functionality. Whether on site or online, participants can gain insight as to how SAP is delivering on its product strategy and helping organizations around the world to run better. For more information, visit www.sapphirenow.com. Follow SAPPHIRE NOW on Twitter at @SAPPHIRENOW and visit the Events Newsroom at www.events.news-sap.com.

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

For more information, press only:
Samantha Finnegan, +1 (650) 276-9350, samantha.finnegan@sap.com, PDT
Jason Loesche, +1 (484) 437 0015, j.loesche@sap.com, EDT
SAP Press Office, +49 (6227) 7-46315, CET; +1 (610) 661-3200, EDT; press@sap.com
Anthony Suarez, Burson-Marsteller, +1 (212) 614-4331, anthony.suarez@bm.com, EDT

During SAPPHIRE NOW (from May 14 to 16), to speak with press contacts on site, please dial the SAP press room: +1 (610) 661-0469.

ORLANDO

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

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

Customer Showcases “Big Data” Results Powered by SAP HANA
MITSUI KNOWLEDGE INDUSTRY analyzes genomes for cancer research and treatment. By building an information value chain that uses SAP HANA with R, open source programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics, for real-time analysis and Hadoop for preprocessing DNA sequences, the company found a way to shorten the genome analysis time from several days down to only 20 minutes.

“Going from a process measured in days to one measured in minutes is radically transforming our customer relationships,” said Yukihisa Kato, CTO and director, MITSUI KNOWLEDGE INDUSTRY. “Using the SAP real-time data platform with SAP HANA at its core will be critical to our DNA going forward and to future business growth.”

SAP Enterprise Information Management Solutions to Power Access to All “Big Data” Sources
SAP envisions SAP Data Services and SAP Information Steward as the industry’s first and only unified solution for data quality, data integration, text data processing, data profiling and metadata management. The company aims to allow users to unlock the full business potential of “big data” by making it easier to integrate and synthesize information across an enterprise’s SAP and non-SAP applications. SAP Data Services and SAP Information Steward are intended to provide both business users and IT with an intuitive and comprehensive information management solution with planned enhancements that include:

• Hadoop integration: reading from and loading to Hive and Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), rapid batch updating and loading to SAP HANA, SAP Sybase IQ server and any other data store, resulting in faster performance
• Text data processing: extending the data view to analyze data sources by performing linguistic analysis and extracting relevant content from files, Web logs and social media
• Authoritative and trustworthy data: helping users understand, assess and improve the quality of data by integrating data quality scorecards directly within business intelligence (BI) and enterprise applications so users can immediately determine the accuracy of the data and if necessary take corrective action

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

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

“We are very excited to work with SAP to provide customers with real-time insights from their Hadoop environments using our complementary solutions,” said Mike Olson, co-founder and CEO, Cloudera. “The SAP real-time data platform, combined with the Cloudera Hadoop Distribution, will deliver unmatched capabilities in next-generation ‘big data’ applications and analytics to the enterprise.”

SAP today also announced a number of innovations on the SAP HANA platform. For more information, see “SAP Continues to Expand Capabilities and Scale of SAP HANA Platform and Ease Developer Adoption.”

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

SAPPHIRE NOW
With SAPPHIRE NOW, SAP offers its customers, partners and prospects even more opportunities to engage in dialogue with peers, participants and thought leaders around the globe. Being held in Orlando, Florida, May 14-16, 2012, this enhanced, real-time event connects attendees on site with global participants through state-of-the-art broadcast studios and an online experience that incorporates the latest social media and community functionality. Whether on site or online, participants can gain insight as to how SAP is delivering on its product strategy and helping organizations around the world to run better. For more information, visit www.sapphirenow.com. Follow SAPPHIRE NOW on Twitter at @SAPPHIRENOW and visit the Events Newsroom at www.events.news-sap.com.

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

For more information, press only:
Samantha Finnegan, +1 (650) 276-9350, samantha.finnegan@sap.com, PDT
Jeff Neal, +1 (925) 236-5035, jeff.neal@sap.com, PDT
SAP Press Office, +49 (6227) 7-46315, CET; +1 (610) 661-3200, EDT; press@sap.com
Anthony Suarez, Burson-Marsteller, +1 (212) 614-4331, anthony.suarez@bm.com, EDT

During SAPPHIRE NOW (from May 14 to 16), to speak with press contacts on site, please dial the SAP press room: +1 (610) 661-0469.

An analytics-driven culture is key to revolutionizing your decision-making process. Gartner states that by 2014, 50 percent of employees will have access to some kind of analytic system. That number rises to 75 percent by 2020. This isn’t surprising, given companies are seeing a real return on their analytics investment – $10.66 dollars for every $1 dollar spent on analytics, according to a Nucleus Research study. Revolutionizing your process for making decisions is critical to thriving for the next 20 years.

How Do You Foster a Culture of Analytics?
Start the process by evaluating how your organization measures up. (Yes, I’m a numbers guy.) How good are you in terms of decision-making, from the board level to the individual, across the following three critical areas:

• Informed: Do you have a clear picture of what’s happening in your organization, including performance, revenues, productivity and customer satisfaction? Do your employees? Their level of knowledge is indicative of their ability to make good decisions. It needs to be Apple simple and Google fast, which is why it’s imperative that we break down the information barriers. Example: Fresh Direct using our business intelligence (BI) solutions
• Aligned: To survive, companies now must be built to change. And that’s not possible unless everyone in your company is aligned around the company’s strategy and objectives. Just having the information isn’t enough… it’s what you do with that information that counts. Corporate alignment is tough in a world that is ever-changing – globally and virtually. Not to mention the constant stream of mergers, acquisitions, divestures and a variety of other outside pressures. Example: Under Armour using SAP Planning and Consolidation
• Adapt: Agility in an organization is more important than ever. But regulatory pressure and a focus on exposure to risk are also at the forefront, from both a tactical and strategic perspective.  You need to be able to adapt quickly without exposing yourself to unnecessary risk. The last decade demonstrated that a company’s ability to adapt to change will determine whether or not they survive. The key is to manage operations so you can be agile but secure. Example: Levi Strauss using SAP Access Control

SAP has provided solutions that allow companies to adopt an informed-aligned-adapt process to drive an analytics culture. We see an opportunity to further drive this culture throughout your entire organization. So, we’ve invested in new innovations that will completely revolutionize the decision-making process and create new markets:

• In-memory: Imagine delivering information in real-time at a lower cost – by more than 50 percent. SAP HANA – our in-memory computing strategy – removes the big-data barrier to relevant information. It blurs the lines between analytics and operational data and helps drive information from multiple data sources to the end user on a mobile device. It’s unlike anything on the market today!
• Predictive analytics: The true beauty of data comes when you can tap into it to understand and predict what may happen in the future, effectively making it work for you. And that’s exactly what our predictive analytics capabilities help you do.
• Mobile-first strategy: Employees are everywhere and are often not in the office, making mobility an imperative. Our mobile-first strategy takes information, alignment and adaptation on the road so you can access analytics from anywhere, increasing the pervasiveness of the decision-making process.
• Social collaboration:  Today, companies need to take advantage of the vast knowledge from their entire ecosystem including resources both inside and outside of their organization. Our social collaboration platform harnesses what’s happening in the social space, so you can make decisions based on both internal and external data.
• Cloud: To make analytics truly pervasive, they have to be easy to adopt – without a lot of IT involvement. So, we added cloud and on-demand deployment options to achieve just that. They also happen to be fast and affordable, which makes adoption even easier.

The latest example of our commitment to innovation made its debut today: SAP Visual Intelligence. I love this solution because it represents so many of the elements I just highlighted. SAP Visual Intelligence leverages SAP HANA to help the user ignite their creativity with beautiful and interactive visualizations, allowing them to ask any question without the need for pre-defined reports, queries or dashboards.

This really is only the beginning. We’re proud of our leadership in the market. We’re committed to a strategy of innovation and we’re excited to see where it will take us.

ORLANDO —

No matter where users sit in a company, they want a way to easily explore, mash up and share information to make better decisions and find new opportunities — without having to task IT to deliver reports. Companies are also looking to maximize existing business intelligence (BI) investments; expanding access allows more people to take advantage of a wealth of existing data and systems to make better-informed decisions.

“The category of visual data discovery has become a must-have component of the BI tool portfolio and SAP has upped its capabilities with its latest product, SAP Visual Intelligence,” said Cindi Howson, founder, BI Scorecard. “Ease of use, time to insight and business agility are key reasons for the rapid growth of visual data discovery that provides users with greater self service with minimal IT support. SAP BusinessObjects Explorer provided ease of use, but the release of SAP Visual Intelligence brings greater flexibility and richer analysis.”

“3M is a diversified company consisting of six different businesses units operating across various industries globally. As a result, we are a data-rich organization that relies on SAP to deliver intuitive BI solutions,” said Jeff Robinson, IT manager, Global Business Intelligence, 3M.  “SAP Visual Intelligence puts our people in the driver’s seat because they can truly discover data on the fly. And because SAP handles the work of combining multiple data sources backed by in-memory technology, self-service analysis hits our users’ screens in seconds.”

Empowering Users in Any Industry or Line of Business to Explore Data and Find Answers
SAP Visual Intelligence draws upon the company’s expertise in 24 industries, 10 lines of business and global footprint to deliver a product that any company can use to deliver answers to users everywhere. For example:

• A loan officer at a bank might wonder how the bank is performing regionally across multiple categories of loans and demographics. Typically this would involve intensive efforts downloading and bringing together information from corporate as well as public data sources to find answers, which would be done manually each time a refresh is needed. SAP Visual Intelligence enables the loan officer to create an automated routine to download census information, combine it with regional loan data as well as additional region and state details to enrich the data. The information could be immediately plotted on a map to discover that loan business had increased 25 percent in the past two years for high-income earners in a specific zip code but new loan applications had slowed significantly. At the next meeting, the team could put together a new campaign targeting sales of loans in the high income areas.
• Responsible for analyzing the numbers of defects across plants and suppliers, a business analyst at a global manufacturing firm could use SAP Visual Intelligence to pull enterprise data as well as external data files sent by suppliers. A mash up of the data might reveal that specific parts and one particular supplier are responsible for 80 percent of the defects. As a result, the engineering team could work with the supplier on correcting the issues.
• A regional manager for a healthy snack company might be tasked with increasing sales of a new health bar in the western region. Working with a business analyst and SAP Visual Intelligence, the regional manager could easily access sales numbers for the last three years and combine this with point of sale data to see that the majority of sales were coming from small stores running a new campaign. On the spot, the regional manager and business analyst could expand the campaign to a broader market and eliminate poorly performing campaigns.

Fast, Engaging Way of Finding Answers Buried in Massive Amounts of Data
Building on SAP BusinessObjects Explorer, SAP Visual Intelligence leverages SAP HANA to help users ignite their creativity with beautiful and interactive visualizations, allowing them to ask any question without the need for predefined queries, reports or dashboards. SAP Visual Intelligence removes roadblocks to information so business users can find real-time answers on any volume of data. The engaging interface increases the usage of data and ability to derive answers and make better decisions. SAP Visual Intelligence enables ad-hoc discovery everywhere, across all data — from spreadsheets to sales, finance, marketing, customer, social, geo-location, third-party and other business data.

Analytics Innovations Revolutionize the Decision-Making Process
Recognized as the BI market share leader by Gartner, today’s announcement is another of example of SAP’s commitment to investing and expanding its analytics portfolio to respond to the needs of customers and the market. Recently announced SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analysis software is intended to help users improve decision-making by predicting future outcomes. Additional planned enhancements to SAP BusinessObjects BI solutions aim to deliver more mobile analytics options, richer insight, improved collaborative decision-making and deeper SAP applications integration. The improved capabilities are planned to help companies extract the most business value from the massive amounts of data that are generated today.

“SAP Visual Intelligence revolutionizes decision-making by offering every person in an organization a fast and extremely easy to use  way of discovering answers from any data,” said John Schweitzer, senior vice president and general manager, Analytics, SAP. “SAP solutions for analytics empower people with precise information anytime and anywhere using beautiful visualizations, enabling rapid response to events as they unfold. SAP delivers a powerful and comprehensive analytics portfolio that helps companies adapt to constant change so they can achieve remarkable results.”

For more information and demos about SAP Visual Intelligence, visit www.experienceexplorer.com. For a closer look, see: “Screenshots: SAP Broadens Analytics Reach.”

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

SAPPHIRE NOW
With SAPPHIRE NOW, SAP offers its customers, partners and prospects even more opportunities to engage in dialogue with peers, participants and thought leaders around the globe. Being held in Orlando, Florida, May 14-16, 2012, this enhanced, real-time event connects attendees on site with global participants through state-of-the-art broadcast studios and an online experience that incorporates the latest social media and community functionality. Whether on site or online, participants can gain insight as to how SAP is delivering on its product strategy and helping organizations around the world to run better. For more information, visit www.sapphirenow.com. Follow SAPPHIRE NOW on Twitter at @SAPPHIRENOW and visit the Events Newsroom at www.events.news-sap.com.

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

For more information, press only:
Susan Miller, SAP, +1 (610) 661-9225, susan.miller@sap.com, EDT
SAP Press Office, +49 (6227) 7-46315, CET; +1 (610) 661-3200, EDT; press@sap.com
Jeff Shadid, Burson-Marsteller, +1 (214) 224-8419, jeff.shadid@bm.com, CDT

During SAPPHIRE NOW (from May 14 to 16), to speak with press contacts on site, please dial the SAP press room: +1 (610) 661-0469.

What is SAP Visual Intelligence?
SAP Visual Intelligence is our latest innovation in the SAP BusinessObjects Explorer software family. It’s a desktop-based visualization and data manipulation solution that allows business users to acquire data from a variety of corporate and personal data sources and manipulate that information without any scripting. Users can then analyze this data, with beautiful visualizations, to quickly discover unique insights that can be easily shared.

Why does SAP Visual Intelligence matter?
In part, SAP Visual Intelligence matters because it helps people – regardless of their technical skill level – to easily discover and analyze data, create stunning visualizations, discover unique business insights and share them with collaborators. What’s more: SAP Visual Intelligence gives them the autonomy to do this on their own, without having to rely on IT assistance. Individuals and teams can now work more independently, and valuable IT resources can become freed up to support key technology initiatives.

How is SAP Visual Intelligence different from SAP BusinessObjects Explorer?
SAP Visual Intelligence was created to complement and extend the value of SAP BusinessObjects Explorer. For most users, the data in SAP BusinessObjects Explorer is assumed. However, analysts need a solution that will allow them to bring together a variety of sources of information, manipulate the data, find answers and share the analysis with their stakeholders. SAP Visual Intelligence is a desktop tool that is easy to download, install and begin using in minutes, enabling analysts to perform these tasks and ignite their creativity. Industries and lines of business requiring real-time access to data will be particularly interested in SAP Visual Intelligence, which can be deployed everywhere from small teams to large corporations.

Does SAP Visual Intelligence Require SAP HANA?
No. SAP Visual Intelligence is a desktop-based solution that is independent of SAP HANA; it is targeted at business analysts and can be downloaded and installed in minutes. The release that was made generally available this week at SAPPHIRE NOW connects to and reads information from SAP HANA for fast, interactive and visual analysis. Upcoming releases will connect to a wide variety of data sources.

Why build versus buy these capabilities?
This news is a perfect example of how SAP is continuing to invest in organic growth and offer additional value to its 190,000 customers worldwide. SAP Visual Intelligence represents a great value to our SAP BusinessObjects Explorer customers by extending functionality rather than introducing overlap with existing solutions. This represents the strength of SAP’s research and development assets, and how they can translate vision into competitive advantages for customers. It’s also consistent with SAP’s growth strategy and commitment to investing in analytics to meet customers’ needs and overall market demand.

How does SAP Visual Intelligence compare to competitors’ offerings?
SAP is the worldwide market share leader for BI, and SAP Visual Intelligence adds to this market by offering self-service BI and data discovery capabilities. While there are smaller players in the market, they offer point solutions that are limited in the size and scope of what they can handle. Plus, with SAP HANA, SAP customers gain the ability to do data discovery at an enterprise level. Only SAP can offer this type of integration to powerful back-end software, coupled with the power and speed to think, decide and act in real time.

Jason Rose is vice president of Business Intelligence Solutions at SAP.

ORLANDO —

“Our ongoing, joint engineering collaboration allowed SAP HANA to take full advantage of the powerful performance, reliability and availability features of the Intel Xeon processor E7 family,” said Diane Bryant, vice president and general manager of Intel’s Datacenter and Connected Systems Group. “The optimization of SAP HANA for Intel processors allows customers to achieve much more efficient results, increasing their record-breaking performance and scalability for mission-critical applications for increased business value.”

SAP HANA delivers scale-up and scale-out solutions for clients to run big data, growth-oriented applications and analytics — including high-volume instances of the SAP NetWeaver® Business Warehouse application — by rapidly scaling to many nodes in high-performance and high-availability configurations. Other key benefits include:

• Ability to handle large volumes of data: In addition to compression of data that fundamentally reduces the amount of memory required, SAP HANA grows with the number of data volumes across multiple nodes. SAP has validated 16 nodes and has not seen limitations on a large number of nodes now certified on demand for partners and customers.
• Better failover and high availability: High availability enables the failover of a node within a distributed SAP HANA database. With cluster configurations, failover uses a cold standby node and gets triggered automatically. If a node fails, the database on a standby server can be cold-started and returns to its last consistent state by replaying the log since the last save point from shared storage. Distributed processing of data allows systems to scale beyond one server and can remove the single point of failure.
• End-to-end improvement in performance: Increasing nodes of SAP HANA clusters enables distribution of data loading and analysis utilizing massively parallel processing (MPP) capabilities.

“With the scale out of SAP HANA, we see almost linear improvement in performance with additional computing nodes,” said Dr. Vishal Sikka, member of the SAP Executive Board, Technology & Innovation. “Recently, in our research labs, we have assembled the largest SAP HANA system that scales to 100 nodes, 4000 computing cores and 100 TB in DRAM. Now CIOs can adopt in-memory databases for large deployments with peace of mind that it can grow with their data and provide breakthrough improvement in end-to-end performance.”

The business value of SAP HANA was demonstrated recently through scalability testing performed by SAP on SAP HANA with a 16-node server cluster. During the testing, SAP HANA allowed SAP NetWeaver BW-like queries to be executed on 100 billion rows of sales and distribution data with sub-second performance results, without any indexing or tuning required. The results of this testing highlights the ability of SAP HANA to enable customers to perform real-time analytics directly on raw transactional data without going through traditional extract, transform and load (ETL) processes and building of aggregates or materialized views. Details on the testing can be found in a recently released SAP HANA performance white paper.

For additional information regarding SAP HANA and in-memory computing technology, visit the Experience SAP HANA website. For announcements, blog posts, videos and other coverage during SAPPHIRE NOW, visit the Events Newsroom.

SAPPHIRE NOW
With SAPPHIRE NOW, SAP offers its customers, partners and prospects even more opportunities to engage in dialogue with peers, participants and thought leaders around the globe. To be held in Orlando, Florida, May 14-16, 2012, this enhanced, real-time event connects attendees on site with global participants through state-of-the-art broadcast studios and an online experience that incorporates the latest social media and community functionality. Whether on site or online, participants can gain insight as to how SAP is delivering on its product strategy and helping organizations around the world to run better. For more information, visit www.sapphirenow.com. Follow SAPPHIRE NOW on Twitter at @SAPPHIRENOW and visit the Events Newsroom at www.events.news-sap.com.

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

Media Contacts:
Samantha Finnegan, +1 (650) 276-9350, samantha.finnegan@sap.com, PDT

Cindy McKendry, +1 (503) 231-7274, cindy.mckendry@sap.com, PDT

During SAPPHIRE NOW (from May 14 to 16), to speak with press contacts on site, please dial the SAP press room: +1 (610) 661-0469.

ORLANDO —

“SAP’s innovation continues with the delivery of these new applications that are simple to use, easy to implement and are built on an open real-time platform,” said Dr. Vishal Sikka, member of the SAP Executive Board, Technology & Innovation. “These applications take advantage of detailed and fresh data, doing complex analysis on-the-fly to power interactive decision-making on mobile devices and in the cloud.”

The solutions announced today are:

• SAP Sales and Operations Planning application
• SAP Cash Forecasting analytic application
• SAP Planning and Consolidation application
• SAP Collections Insight analytic application
• SAP Sales Pipeline Analysis analytic content
• SAP Bank Analyzer rapid-deployment solution for financial reporting with SAP HANA
• SAP Deposits Management rapid-deployment solution for transaction history analysis with SAP HANA
• SAP Supplier InfoNet site

Next Generation Planning Applications powered by SAP HANA
SAP Sales and Operations Planning is a cloud-based application powered by SAP HANA and designed to help companies become more demand-driven by enabling them to rapidly translate demand fluctuations into actionable plans for manufacturing, procurement and logistics. With the new application, companies can engage stakeholders from sales, marketing, finance, supply chain and other functions in a truly integrated and collaborative planning process. SAP Sales and Operations Planning brings together the real-time computing power of SAP HANA and the social collaborative paradigm of the SAP Streamwork application to enable:

• Planning, using a unified model of demand, supply chain and financial data, which can be analyzed in real time at any level of granularity or dimension
• Rapid simulations and scenario comparison on a complete, detailed sales and operations planning model against multiple criteria such as demand fluctuations, product mix changes and capacity constraints
• Collaboration, using an embedded, context-aware social platform to accelerate planning and decision-making across the company

More details on SAP Sales & Operations Planning, Powered by SAP HANA can be found in this video.

“In relatively short period of time, we were able to model a significant portion of our business in the pilot environment and perform what-if scenario analysis,” said Richard Komm, director, Advanced Micro Devices. “We could adjust demand volumes and the capacity resource allocations and immediately see their impact on revenue and margins in the solution. This is something that used to take multiple spreadsheets, numerous emails and phone calls and meetings to develop an aligned plan. We feel that this solution has great potential to improve our sales and operations planning process management and accelerate decision-making and the overall responsiveness of our teams.”

“Today, our sales and operations planning process is largely manual, managed over disconnected spreadsheets, spans multiple internal teams and contract manufacturers, and it takes too much time and effort to respond to demand and supply variations,” said James Smith, director, McKesson. “We were able to assess the impact of fluctuations in capacity positions at contract manufacturers on our sales forecasts in real time, model alternative scenarios and cut our planning cycle time in half. We are excited about the solution and look forward to rolling it out at McKesson.”

SAP Cash Forecasting is an on-premise analytic application built on the SAP HANA platform that helps companies better navigate today’s volatile financial environment by providing advanced capabilities for cash forecasting and analysis in a heterogeneous system landscape. The application is available via an early adoption program. With SAP Cash Forecasting, companies can:

• Create accurate cash forecasts based on financial data from SAP and non-SAP systems such as ERP
• Develop an effective foreign exchange hedging strategy based on real-time visibility into exposure across multiple currencies
• Perform ex-post variance analysis on cash forecasts with the ability to explain variance down to the cash flow statement item-level
• Manage the forecast process centrally, tracking subsidiaries’ planning status and consolidating forecasts from across the company

“BSH Bosch und Siemens Hausgeräte GmbH co-innovated with SAP on the new SAP Cash Forecasting analytic application, which is built on the SAP HANA platform,” said Marco Dockweiler, enterprise architect, BSH Bosch und Siemens Hausgeräte GmbH. “This application has the potential to improve cash forecast accuracy and to optimize our processes in the treasury department. The results we have seen are very compelling, and we look forward to our continued collaboration with SAP.”

SAP Planning and Consolidation helps organizations dramatically accelerate their planning processes, giving financial professionals more analytics power and smarter insights, as well as time savings. Powered by SAP HANA, the application enables companies to accelerate budgeting and forecasting by speeding up the retrieval of queries, pull in large data sets and get a real-time view of what’s happening in the business. As a result, people can plan faster, input data back into systems faster and shrink planning cycles, enabling organizations to more quickly respond to capitalize on opportunities or avoid risks. This also provides simplicity for IT as the application is optimized in real-time with SAP HANA. 

Empowering Sales and Marketing Users With Real-Time Solutions
SAP Collections Insight provides sales teams with the real-time customer insights they need to optimize their collections strategy and the collaborative tools to execute that strategy. The application is available via an early adoption program. Powered by SAP HANA and accessible via an easy-to-use Web or mobile app, SAP Collections Insight helps companies:

• Develop rich, dynamic profiles of their customers, including real-time visibility and analysis of payment history and trends
• Equip users to quickly make and act on collection calls — anytime, anywhere
• Empower users to collaborate rapidly and effectively to track and resolve collections issues

The capabilities delivered by SAP Collections Insight can enable companies to increase collections yield, accelerate the conversion of revenue to cash and strengthen their customer relationships.

SAP Sales Pipeline Analysis, powered by SAP HANA, helps sales organizations to get instant insights into massive volumes of pipeline data in the SAP Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM) application while performing on-the-fly calculations and in-depth analysis on any business dimension. Sales managers can react more quickly to changing sales conditions with real-time information and accelerate deals through the pipeline with powerful and user-driven analytics. As a result, companies can unlock hidden revenue opportunities as well as significantly increase profits and sales effectiveness. To help ensure a quicker time-to-value for customers, the content can be deployed as a rapid-deployment solution with the SAP rapid-deployment solution for sales pipeline analysis with SAP HANA.

Taking Advantage of “Big Data” in the Banking Industry
SAP Bank Analyzer rapid-deployment solution for financial reporting with SAP HANA is designed to help organizations quickly analyze large volumes of data, enabling them to automate lean banking processes and make decisions in near real time. The solution enables banking organizations to rapidly generate detailed financial reports on assets and accounting performance, offering immediate answers to their business questions.

SAP Deposits Management rapid-deployment solution for transaction history analysis with SAP HANA helps retail banks boost performance through improved transaction history analysis. It makes it easy for employees to access up-to-date account information, while powerful in-memory data platform and business intelligence (BI) software helps organizations process multi-year information for real-time insights.

Drive Greater Visibility and Stronger Performance Across the Business Network
SAP Supplier InfoNet is an information network that brings together the power of SAP HANA and the cloud to help companies gain real-time insights from ‘big data” and rapidly respond to changing conditions across their multi-tier supply networks. With this solution, companies are able to effectively manage their complex supply chains by:

• Proactively monitoring and predicting risks across the multi-tier supply network with real-time alerts and leading-edge machine learning and statistical analysis tools
• Gaining instant insights into the operational health of the supply network by aggregating and analyzing supplier data from enterprise systems and thousands of external data sources
• Benchmarking supplier performance on quality and delivery and identifying significant shifts and trends in their performance

The capabilities delivered by SAP Supplier InfoNet empower companies to minimize supply chain disruptions before they impact the business, drive stronger performance of their suppliers and save time and operational costs of managing the supplier base.

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

SAPPHIRE NOW
With SAPPHIRE NOW, SAP offers its customers, partners and prospects even more opportunities to engage in dialogue with peers, participants and thought leaders around the globe. Being held in Orlando, Florida, May 14-16, 2012, this enhanced, real-time event connects attendees on site with global participants through state-of-the-art broadcast studios and an online experience that incorporates the latest social media and community functionality. Whether on site or online, participants can gain insight as to how SAP is delivering on its product strategy and helping organizations around the world to run better. For more information, visit www.sapphirenow.com. Follow SAPPHIRE NOW on Twitter at @SAPPHIRENOW and visit the Events Newsroom at www.events.news-sap.com. 

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

For more information, press only:
Samantha Finnegan, +1 (650) 276-9350, samantha.finnegan@sap.com, PDT
Cathrin Wolf, +49 6227 7 63908, cathrin.wolf@sap.com, CET
SAP Press Office, +49 (6227) 7-46315, CET; +1 (610) 661-3200, EDT; press@sap.com

During SAPPHIRE NOW (from May 14 to 16), to speak with press contacts on site, please dial the SAP press room: +1 (610) 661-0469.