Published on the 09/11/2016 | Written by Newsdesk
Top of the news coming out of SAP’s TechEd underway in Barcelona is a ‘next generation’ HANA Platform…
Its name? ‘SAP HANA 2 platform’ and it is based on the in-memory technology which is generally assumed when anything in SAP’s nomenclature has a HANA involved.
The German giant also announced new microservices available through Hybris as a Service (Hybris is SAP’s omnichannel commerce platform), the first fruits of its partnership with Apple, and new features for its V-2 cloud platform as a service (PaaS), including support for virtual machines, prebuilt integrations for Ariba Cloud Integration Gateway, beta versions of workflow and business rules services and data streaming for Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios.
The vendor said SAP HANA 2 will provide improved database and data management, analytical intelligence with enhanced processing engines for text, spatial, graph and streaming data, and greater flexibility for application developers. Version 2 is planned for release at the end of this month, with the vendor saying it expects to deliver technology enhancements twice a year ‘to support agile IT’.
Cloud-based microservices, said SAP, can enhance applications with analytical insight using APIs and any language or development platform. New SAP HANA services for Hybris include Text Analysis Entity Extraction, Text Analysis Fact Extraction and Text Analysis Linguistic Analysis. SAP said this will allow for the use of text data processing to enhance applications with natural language processing. Perhaps Siri will get a kick out of that – see below.
Even cleverer is its ‘Earth Observation Analysis’ service, released in beta. SAP said this was co-developed with the European Space Agency (ESA) and is based on the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) EO-WCS standard. The microservice accesses satellite data from ESA and uses SAP HANA to perform spatial processing in the cloud, to deliver historic information about vegetation, water, soil and other spectral indexes in real time.
Unlikely bedfellows perhaps, but SAP and Apple partnered up in May 2016 ‘to help enable workers to access the critical enterprise data, processes and user experience they need to make decisions and take action right from their iPhone or iPad’.
Thus is born SAP’s HANA Cloud Platform SDK for iOS, which it said is being rolled out to select customers and partners. Also announced is a SAP Academy for iOS to provide the education, training and tools for developers. In preview at present, the academy is planned for availability ‘in Spring 2017’. With the conference taking place in Europe, we’re going to assume that means the Antipodean autumn.
More detail on the announcements can be found at SAP’s News Centre.
