SAP Partners With Intel and Hortonworks

SAP AG announced the expansion of
big data offerings around three major pillars: the SAP HANA platform,
applications enabled for big data and data science.

SAP has entered reseller agreements with Intel Corporation
and Hortonworks, Inc. to resell and
support the Intel Distribution Apache Hadoop and the Hortonworks Data Platform
with SAP HANA, expanding existing partnerships with both vendors.

The company also
announced a new big data-enabled application for manufacturers. Furthermore,
SAP has created a new Data Science organization to better help customers
uncover relevant signals within their data. Additionally, the ‘Big Data Geek Challenge’ is now open. The announcements were made
at TechCrunch Disrupt, being held September 7-11 in San Francisco, CA.

"The SAP HANA platform and its
integration with Hadoop have married together real-time insights with extreme
storage, solving one of the biggest problems with current big data solutions, a
fragmented landscape of solutions that are difficult to connect together,"
said Steve Lucas, president, platform solutions, SAP. "Our expanded big data strategy provides
customers a single, integrated approach to combine enterprise data and
additional information to employees and consumers, as well as improve business
processes such as customer engagement, preventative maintenance and responsive
supply chain."

SAP Partners With Intel and Hortonworks

to Redistribute Apache Hadoop
SAP has
signed agreements to redistribute and support Intel Distribution Apache Hadoop
and Hortonworks Data Platform to customers. Customers are envisioned to be able
to purchase big data solutions supported by SAP and leveraging capabilities of technologies
such as SAP HANA, Apache Hadoop, SAP Sybase IQ software, SAP Data Services
software and SAP BusinessObjects business intelligence solutions.
Integration with Apache Hadoop is part of SAP’s overall strategy to provide
valuable insights across a continuum of data from the efficient storage of
massive amounts of cold data, to petabyte-level storage of warm data to
real-time and streaming data analysis.

"Enterprises today are looking for big data
solutions that are simple and quick to implement that enable insight from all
data in real time in a secure environment to improve business processes,"
said Boyd David, VP and GM of Intel’s datacenter software division. "With performance optimizations for Intel
hardware as well as encryption and decryption improvements for better security,
the integration of the Intel Distribution for Apache Hadoop with the SAP HANA
platform provides enterprises with security and scalability without having to
sacrifice performance."

"By reselling the Hortonworks Data
Platform, SAP can assure their customers they are deploying an SAP HANA and
Hadoop architecture fully supported by SAP, while giving them the benefits of a
fully open source Hadoop distribution," said Shaun Connolly, VP, corporate
strategy, Hortonworks. "Hortonworks
is committed to contributing all of its innovations back to the Apache project,
ensuring that 100% of their Hadoop distribution is open source."

This news expands on existing partnerships SAP previously announced with
Intel in February 2013. Additionally, SAP intends to continue to certify and
support all the Apache Hadoop distributions as a part of the overall SAP
partner program.

SAP Announces Demand
Signal Management
Application for Manufacturers
Manufacturers
are striving to become demand-driven in order to be more responsive to their
customers’ needs. To do so, manufacturers need visibility and access to
downstream demand data and customer insight.

Capturing large volumes of downstream demand signals, i.e., a retailer’s
point-of-sale data, along with market research data and consumer sentiment.
Gaining valuable and real-time insights that shall help enable supply chain,
sales and marketing functions to become more responsive and demand-driven.

Demand Signal Management is the first in a series of big data-enabled
applications SAP intends to release before the end of 2013, including the SAP
Fraud Management analytic application as well as the SAP Customer Engagement
Intelligence solution, which includes the SAP Audience Discovery and Targeting,
SAP Customer Value Intelligence, SAP Social Contact Intelligence and SAP
Account Intelligence analytic applications. By deploying big data-enabled
applications, enterprises can get to repeatable, measurable results much faster
by infusing insights directly into day-to-day operations.

Demand Signal Management shall combine captured data with internal business
data to provide a holistic view of how customer demand and sales are
materializing in real time. Analytics shall help visualize and analyze this
data at any level of granularity as well as cross-navigate to SAP Business
Suite applications.

SAP Taps Top Data Scientist Talent
to help customers drive value from big data
The new Data Science organization at SAP brings together the top data scientist
talent within the company by consolidating regional data science teams into a
central organization closely aligned to the overall big data strategy.

The role of the new organization
within
the company’s big data strategy includes:

Helping companies understand the link between the business imperative and
disparate volumes of data.
Uncovering insights to predict and shape the future with breakthrough data
science innovation.
Building proprietary customer solutions, extending existing solutions and
optimizing big data-enabled SAP applications.
Applying a portfolio of patents and intellectual property to SAP applications.

"Every fantasy football participant
is looking for innovative ways to gain the competitive edge. One example of innovation
is applying more information and sophisticated analytics to improve the fantasy
football experience to allow each player to make better, smarter and faster
decisions on their teams." said Cory Mummery, senior director, NFL Fantasy and Digital Media. "Easy-to-use resources such as the player
comparison tool give users guided instructions to make the best possible
game-day decisions by factoring in years of statistical performance and
intangibles such as weather, injuries, game location, player rest and more."

SAP announces big data contests
To inspire the data community to discover and tell
the most compelling stories using data, SAP has launched a new contest where
participants can use new visualizations and big data technologies to
demonstrate how they have turned data into meaningful insights that drive
change, however big or small. In the Big Data Geek Challenge, participants will have the chance to win $10,000 or a trip to Sapphire
Now by demonstrating how they can tap into big data to drive new innovations
for a specific business process or opportunity. Additional prizes will be
awarded for submissions that highlight a big data use case to further a good
cause, as well as one for the top partner submission.

In addition, SAP is announcing an upcoming contest with Chevrolet calling for
developers to submit connected car applications to help solve global mobility
challenges.