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What’s New with HANA 2

Enterprises that have migrated to the SAP HANA database are making digital transformation a reality, achieving great ROI, accelerating their business processes and taking analytics to a new level.  As an example, one company named Building Radar that uses HANA supplies verified sales leads in the building construction field.  Taking an immense amount of data and applying geographic and socio-economic layers, HANA gives them the ability to create real-time analytics and discover these leads.

Recent companies such as Hershey’s, COOP and Hillary’s Blinds have all benefitted from the speed and impact on business processes now that they are using the HANA database.  Companies that waited in the wings can now feel more confident in moving to SAP’s in-memory computing platform. SAP released HANA2 at the end of last month, its newest release of the in-memory computing database.  Since the introduction of HANA in 2010, SAP has released 12 Support Pack Stacks (SPS) for HANA.

According to Marie Goodell, the VP of Product Marketing at SAP, “When the time comes to upgrade, apps that run on SPS 12 should run on HANA 2 with no interruption, and companies that do choose to upgrade can look forward to a host of new features.”

Some of the new key features and enhancements for HANA 2 include »

  • Database management: IT organizations will be able to provide business continuity with enhanced high availability, security, workload management and administration enhancements. For example, the new active/active read-enabled option enables IT organizations to leverage secondary systems – previously used only for system replication – to off-load read-intensive workloads for improved operations.
  • Data management: Businesses are expected to leverage data, regardless of where it resides, with enhancements to enterprise modeling, data integration, data quality and tiered storage. A new edition of the SAP Enterprise Architecture Designer Web application that works with and is powered by SAP HANA allows IT organizations to manage complex information architectures and visualize the potential impact of new technologies before they are implemented.
  • Analytical intelligence: Developers are embedding rich insight into applications with enhanced analytical processing engines for text, spatial, graph and streaming data. For example, new algorithms for classification, association, time series and regression have been added to the predictive analytics library to empower data scientists to discover new patterns and incorporate machine learning into custom applications.
  • Application development: Developers are expected to build and deploy next-generation applications with enhanced functions for application servers, development tools and languages. For example, bring-your-own-language support provides a choice of additional third-party build packs and runtimes that can be used within SAP HANA extended application services, advanced model. Also, a new file processor API enables developers to extract text and metadata from documents to deliver deeper insights.

New SAP HANA Microservices in the Cloud

Users of cloud-based microservices powered by SAP HANA can enhance applications with analytical insight using simple APIs and any language or development platform.  The new SAP HANA services in the cloud include:

  • Text Analysis Entity Extraction, Text Analysis Fact Extraction and Text Analysis Linguistic Analysis: Use text data processing features in the cloud for application enhancement with natural language processing.
  • Earth Observation Analysis service (beta): Co-innovated with European Space Agency (ESA) and based on the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) EO-WCS standard, this microservice accesses satellite data from ESA and uses SAP HANA, spatial edition, to perform spatial processing in the cloud. The new service, announced today in conjunction with Munich RE, delivers historic information about vegetation, water, soil and other spectral indexes in real time.

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Now that HANA 2 is being released, we see many enterprises adopting HANA, taking the most from an N-1 strategy and getting the best ROI for in-memory computing.  This rise in company adoption to a more powerful in-memory database like HANA, as seen in the Building Radar example above, signifies even greater migration to HANA in 2017.

“SAP HANA 2 represents a continuation of technology innovation by SAP, designed to enable organizations to address the fast-changing aspects of digital business,” said Carl Olofson, research vice president, IDC. “SAP HANA 2 features new and enhanced functions that can enhance data management and accelerate application development for digital transformation. In addition, new SAP HANA microservices in the cloud, accessible through SAP Hybris as a Service, are expected to increase innovation of insight-driven applications to deliver competitive advantage for SAP customers.”

Make 2017 your company’s year for digital transformation and business success with SAP HANA.  For a constructive tutorial on the migration to HANA, check out the webinar How to Succeed with SAP HANA »