Category Archives: SAP

Channel, Genband, Kandy, News & Analysis, PaaS, Platform as a service, SAP

SAP to become a Genband reseller as Kandy improves relationship in the cloud

SAP1Texas-based comms software specialist Genband has signed SAP as a global reseller of its comms platform-as-a-service (PaaS) Kandy. Under the terms of the arrangement, Kandy will be repackaged as the SAP Real-Time Communicator Web application by Genband.

The system is designed to help any sized enterprise to improve its workflow by improving its communications processes, making them simpler to use and more effective. This is achieved by making it easier for sales, service and business professionals to adopt the chat, videoconference and collaboration systems that are often under-used in many companies. By improving real time communications between customers and co-workers SAP says its cloud offering will makes its enterprise clients far more effective sales organisations.

SAP claims its Real-Time Communicator creates personalized engagement and helps them stand out from competitors through a superior customer experience. In its capacity as a reseller SAP has integrated Real-Time Communicator into the rest of its portfolio and embedded communications within its business applications, giving them presence, instant messaging, voice and video chat and conferencing. The Real-Time Communicator is integrated natively into SAP Cloud for Customer, and can be integrated with the SAP Hybris Commerce system.

Genband’s executive VP of Strategy and Cloud Services Paul Pluschkell said SAP, as the world’s top cloud player, is the ideal reseller partner to collaborate with. “Integrating with SAP creates a powerful customer experience that empowers customers to work smarter and more efficiently,” said Pluschkell.

The combination creates dramatic improvements in productivity for clients said Nayaki Nayyar, senior VP of Cloud for Customer Engagement at SAP. Managing vital relationships helps make the experience richer, more contextual and highly efficient, said Nayyar. SAP is reselling Genband because it has created an advanced market offering and the only one that could help SAP launch new offerings across its applications. “Genband’s technology performance leadership, global presence and comprehensive product portfolio, all factored into our decision to select this platform,” said Nayyar.

Enterprise Cloud, Enterprise IT, HANA, News & Analysis, SAP

SAP claims to have simplified its Business Suite for all enterprise cloud users

SAP HANA VoraSAP has updated its suite of on-premise and cloud editions included in its Business Suite 4 SAP HANA range, which it promised will simplify processes in a range of functions and lines of business.

The announcement of improvements to its SAP S/4HANA Enterprise Management system was made at SAP TechEd in Barcelona.

SAP claimed it has invented new, simpler and faster ways of using its systems in eight major areas that affect users working in finance, sales, service, marketing, commerce, procurement and sourcing, manufacturing, supply chain, asset management, research and development and human resources.

Finance, sales and purchasing staff will benefit from a new method of optimized working capital with new accounts payable and receivable cockpits. In the supply chain, workers can benefit from a new system with fewer stock buffers and a simplified data model for inventory management. This, says SAP, will speed things up by catering for more real-time, high-volume processing. In other departments, procurement, sourcing and supply chain management professionals will benefit from new levels of instant insight into stock and material flow.

Meanwhile, in other part of the enterprise, cloud users in Production Departments will benefit from shorter manufacturing cycles, as a result of streamlined material flow for internal requirements and for material requirements planning. Project managers and supervisors will become more productive, claims SAP, thanks to its new augmented reactivity with real-time monitoring of production orders for flow and critical issues.

Operations managers, on the other hand, will make better operational decisions with easier simulation of supply alternatives. Buyers will be able to lower their procurement costs as a result of the advances on standard integration to the Ariba Network. Meanwhile, at the shop floor, enterprises will be able to offer better customer service thanks to a new sales order fulfilment cockpit that could identify and clear bottlenecks instantly.

These line of business improvements will be found across the SAP portfolio in applications such as SAP Cash Management, SAP SuccessFactor, the Ariba Network in procurement and SAP hybris systems for marketing and commerce.

“We worked together closely to identify where digitized operations can provide the most value,” said Bernd Leukert, member of the Executive Board of SAP SE, Products & Innovation.

Analytics, Big Data, Database, Google, News & Analysis, SAP

SAP unveils new powers within Analytics in the Cloud

SAP1SAP has unveiled a new user-friendly analytics service for enterprises which it claims will give better insights by offering an ‘unparalleled user experience’.

The SAP Cloud for Analytics will be delivered through a planned software as a service (SaaS) offering that unifies all SAP’s analytical functions into one convenient dashboard.

Built natively on the SAP HANA Cloud platform, it will be a scalable, multi-tenant environment at a price which SAP says is affordable to companies and individuals. The new offering aims to bring together a variety of existing services including business intelligence, planning, budgeting and predictive capacity.

According to SAP, it has fine tuned workflows so that it’s easier for user to get from insight to action, as one application spirits the uses through this journey more rapidly. It achieves this by giving universal access to all data, digesting it and forwarding the right components to the right organs of the organisation. An intuitive user interface (UI) will help all users, from specialists such as finance professionals to generalists such as line of business analysts, to build connected planning models, analyze data and collaborate. It can extend to unstructured data, helping users to spot market trends within social media and correlate them with company inventories, SAP claims.

It’s all about breaking down the divisions between silos and blending the data to make visualization and forecasting possible, said Steve Lucas, president, Platform Solutions, SAP. “SAP Cloud for Analytics will be a new cloud analytics experience. That to me is more than visualization of data, that’s realization of success,” said Lucas.

SAP said it is also working with partners to provide seamless workflows.

SAP and Google are collaborating to extend the levels of analysis available to customers, according to Prabhakar Raghavan, VP of Engineering at Google Apps. “These innovations are planned to allow Google Apps for Work users to embed, refresh and edit SAP Cloud for Analytics content directly in Google Docs and Google Sheets,” said Raghaven.

Analytics, Big Data, Hadoop, News & Analysis, SAP, Telco Cloud, Vora

SAP announces improvements to cloud platform and Vora analytics software

SAP HANA VoraSAP has released new software that it claims will make analytics easier for users of open source Hadoop software.

The SAP HANA Vora is a new in-memory query engine that improves the performance of the Apache Spark execution framework. As a result, anyone running data analysis should be able to get better interactions with their data if it’s held on Hadoop and companies will benefit from more useful intelligence.

SAP claims this new software will overcome the general ‘lack of business process awareness’ that exists in companies across enterprise apps, analytics, big data and Internet of Things (IoT) sources. The software will make it easier for data scientists and developers to get access to the right information by simplifying the access to corporate and Hadoop data.

SAP HANA Vora will bring most benefit in industries where Big Data analytics in business process context is paramount. SAP identified financial services, telecommunications, healthcare and manufacturing as target markets. The savings created by the new software will come from a number of areas, it said. In the financial sector, the return on investment in the systems will come from mitigating risk and fraud by detecting new anomalies in financial transactions and customer history data.

Telecoms companies will benefit from optimising their bandwidth, SAP claims, as telcos use the software to analyse traffic patterns to avoid network bottlenecks and improve the quality of service. Manufacturers will benefit from preventive maintenance and improved product re-call processes as a result of SAL HANA Vora’s newly delivered powers of analysis of bills-of-material, services records and sensor data.

The use of Hadoop and SAP HANA to manage large unstructured data sets left room for improvement, according to user Aziz Safa, Intel IT Enterprise Applications and Application Strategy VP. “One of the key requirements is better analyses of big data,” said Safa, “but mining these large data sets for contextual information in Hadoop is a challenge.”

SAP HANA Vora will be released by the end of September, when a cloud-based developer edition will also be available. Here’s a SAP vid on the matter.

 


Big Data, HANA, News & Analysis, Quentin Clark, SAP, Stacey Allaster, tennis, WTA

WTA, SAP team on tennis analytics using HANA cloud

SAP and the WTA are partnering to develop a cloud-based analytics service for tennis players and coaches

SAP and the WTA are partnering to develop a cloud-based analytics service for tennis players and coaches

The Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) and SAP have partnered to develop tennis analytics software for players and coaches based on SAP HANA.

The cloud-based analytics platform will offer players and coaches side-by-side comparisons of the full list of match stats for both players, updated in near real-time; scoring data that analyses player’s service performance, success rate in closing out a game while serving and number of break points saved; and tracking data showing player’s serve direction and placement on the court, contact point for returning a serve and placement of rally shots.

The organisations said players and coaches will be able to access the analytics platform from WTA-authorised tablets.

“The WTA and SAP Tennis Analytics is a game-changer that will not only enhance our athletes’ preparation and performance but also the fans’ experiences when watching women’s tennis,” said Stacey Allaster, chief executive and chairman of the WTA.

“Analyzing data is fundamental to player and coach development, and this state-of-the-art technology, which more and more of our performers are now using, will take our sport to a new and exciting level and lead the way in sports technology,” she said.

Quentin Clark, chief technology officer and member of the global managing board, SAP said: “Our relationship with the WTA is another example of how SAP collaborates with partners to create ground-breaking solutions that change the way athletes utilize data and information to optimise their performance.”

SAP has partnered with a number of sports association in recent years. Earlier this year it partnered with the National Hockey League (NHL) to roll out a co-designed cloud-based platform which the two organisations said would help bring vast amounts of official NHL statistical information directly to the website in real time.

Enterprise IT, HANA, Lufthansa, News & Analysis, SAP

Lufthansa enlists SAP to help crunch IoT data

Lufthansa's IT-focused subsidiary is analysing IoT data to optimise its operations

Lufthansa’s IT-focused subsidiary is analysing IoT data to optimise its operations

Lufthansa Systems is using SAP HANA to bridge the gap between GIS systems and Internet of Things sensors to optimise flight operations.

The IT solutions-focused subsidiary of the German airline, a longtime customer and partner of SAP, said it is using HANA SPS10 to track flight operations and combine the data with information on changes in airport and meteorological conditions, and other fleet-related data monitored and analysed in real-time.

“Together with SAP, we built a prototype of a future operational database for commercial flight support,” said Christoph Krüger, lead architect, Lufthansa Systems.

“The spatial engine in SAP HANA has given us the ability to track thousands of flights per day on a rich 3D mapping interface that includes both spatial and temporal coordinates.”

“At the same time, we were able to uncover breakthrough application scenarios that would not have been possible.”

The company is using the solution to dispatch, monitor and visualise air traffic in a bid to optimise its operations.

Ginni Rometty, IBM, Kevin Turner, Luka Mucic, Microsoft, News & Analysis, quarterly results, SAP, Vendor

IBM, Microsoft struggle while SAP largely bucks the trend

IBM, Microsoft and SAP all released their financial results this week

IBM, Microsoft and SAP all released their financial results this week

IBM and Microsoft revealed steep losses this week as the two companies released their Q2 financial results, but SAP seems to have bucked the trend with close to 130 per cent growth in cloud revenues and 13 per cent growth in revenue.

IBM revealed second quarter net income from continuing operations was $3.5bn compared with $4.3bn in the second quarter of 2014, a decrease of 17 per cent, and revenue was down 13 per cent, much of which it blamed on recent large divestitures and related cash impairments.

Year on year growth in its cloud business – from $2.8bn in the second quarter last year to $4.5bn in Q2 2015 – and ten per cent growth in its analytics business hasn’t fully compensated for some of the challenges the company facing elsewhere in its business. The company’s revenues have been in decline for almost three years sequentially.

“Our results for the first half of 2015 demonstrate that we continue to transform our business to higher value and return value to shareholders,” said Ginni Rometty, IBM chairman, president and chief executive officer. “We expanded margins, continued to innovate across our portfolio and delivered strong growth in our strategic imperatives of cloud, analytics and engagement, which are becoming a significant part of our business.”

Microsoft saw quarterly revenues hit $22.2bn in Q2 this year, but the company reported record losses of $14.7bn, much of which resulted from the impact of its $7.5bn write-down of its failing Nokia business, with other costs related to the restructuring nearing $1bn. The company also said the strengthening of the dollar relative to other currencies had a significant impact on its results.

But Microsoft reported commercial cloud revenues grew of 88 per cent in the quarter, driven largely by Office 365, Azure and Dynamics CRM Online uptake, while the division selling on-premise licenses for its productivity offerings declined 4 per cent; the company said it added roughly 3 million cloud users in the quarter.

“In our commercial business we continue to transform the product mix to annuity cloud solutions and now have 75,000 partners transacting in our cloud,” said Kevin Turner, chief operating officer at Microsoft.

German software giant SAP seems to be one of the few large incumbents bucking the trend this quarter. The company revealed cloud subscriptions and support revenue grew 129 per cent in Q2, new cloud bookings were up 162 per cent, and it more than doubled its SAP HANA customers year on year (from 3,600 to over 7,200). The company reported overall quarterly revenues rose 13 per cent to €1.39bn.

“Our second quarter growth in new cloud bookings was significantly higher than in the first quarter. This momentum showed across our entire cloud and business network portfolio,” said SAP chief financial officer Luka Mucic. “Our operating profit performance is beginning to reflect the business transformation we initiated to make SAP ready for the future. We are on track to achieve our full year business outlook.”

The results come as all three companies – Microsoft, IBM and SAP – continue ambitious redeployment and reorganisation efforts to address a shift in the market towards cloud services and away from legacy software and services.

Bluefin, consultancy, HANA, James Appleby, Krishnakumar Natarajan, M&A, Mindtree, News & Analysis, SAP

IT consultancy Mindtree buys Bluefin to bolster SAP expertise

Mindtree has acquired Bluefin to bolster its SAP cred

Mindtree has acquired Bluefin to bolster its SAP cred

Mindtree has acquired Bluefin Solutions, an IT consultancy with particular expertise in SAP software, for an undisclosed sum. Krishnakumar Natarajan, chief executive and managing director of  Mindtree told BCN the move will help boost its European presence and its competencies around IoT, in-memory computing, and mobile.

Headquartered in the UK, Bluefin delivers a range of IT consultancy services with a specialisation in SAP technology, and Natarajan said the acquisition will bolster its reach in traditional European enterprises and public sector organisations, and create opportunities to bring its HANA cloud expertise to the US.

“SAP is not only a powerhouse of innovation, it is the commercial backbone of many of the largest global enterprises,” Natarajan said. “Mindtree and Bluefin can now offer unique integrated front-end, back-end and support services with unrivalled expertise on a global scale. This is essential to truly global organisations looking to use technology to digitize the entire value chain.

James Appleby, group chief executive of Bluefin Solutions told BCN that while its clients continue to look to it for expertise in many traditional areas where SAP has some tech leverage – BI, EPM, CRM, trade investment solutions – its clients are increasingly looking to take those platforms to the cloud, a strong growth area for the company.

“One of our most interesting client-observations is in the UK Public Sector, where the coincidental timing of government cut backs and the maturing of new technologies has been a disruptive force of innovation, particularly around citizen engagement, willingness to share and the opportunities offered by cloud,” he said.

“We certainly see an increased uptake of SaaS solutions in large enterprises with C4C really only taking off in the last 12 months in a meaningful way.  IaaS is now the default choice in many organisations for non-productive solutions and the decisions organisations are taking regarding HANA will increase the uptake of IaaS both as a platform for productive and non-productive use.”

He explained SAP’s HANA Enterprise Cloud had some teething problems at first, which wasn’t helped by the way the firm priced its consumption-based licensing, but that its PaaS – HANA Cloud Platform – remains massively underexploited in today’s market.

“Currently we are seeing it being used to extend SaaS applications but it is a powerful modern platform which could deliver much more for clients in terms of value,” he said.

Cisco, Deutsche Telekom, Huawei, News & Analysis, Salesforce, SAP, T-Systems, Telco Cloud

Deutsche Telekom wants to double cloud revenues by 2018

Deutsche Telekom wants to bolster its cloud business

Deutsche Telekom wants to bolster its cloud business

Deutsche Telekom said this week aims to redouble efforts to beat out big IT incumbents in the increasingly lucrative cloud services segment. Through the telco’s IT-focused subsidiary it intends to double cloud revenues over the next three years.

The company said it wants to start generating upwards of two billion euros annually from cloud services by 2018, double what it says it currently pulls in.

“At Deutsche Telekom, we want to grow by more than 20 percent each year in the field of cloud platforms, and to become the leading provider for businesses in Europe,” said Ferri Abolhassan, head of the IT Division at T-Systems.

Last year revenues from cloud solutions, in particular private cloud services, increased double digits at the firm, Abolhassan explained. But with the battle for cloud revenue heating up with more traditional IT service providers and vendors the company needs to scale up its cloud activities both within and outside T-Systems.

“The market for services from the public cloud – infrastructure, platforms and applications – that can be accessed through the public Internet promises further growth. In conjunction with partners, Deutsche Telekom plans to pit itself more strongly against the Internet corporations Google and Amazon in future. To achieve this, the departments within Deutsche Telekom’s segments are now stepping up their cloud activities across the Group,” he said, adding that DT will also continue to try and differentiate on security.

Telco’s haven’t been the natural choice for enterprise IT professionals but over the past few years many like DT have stepped up their cloud strategies, a move which largely sees them both acquiring successful cloud incumbents and integrate them into their own operations – for instance Verizon’s acquisition of Terremark, or CenturyLink’s acquisition of Savvis – and using their existing commercial telecoms and managed services clients as direct channels.

Partnerships are also key in this segment and earlier this year DT announced a flurry of cloud-centric deals with Cisco, Huawei, SAP and Salesforce. That said, the move could be a sign DT will soon ramp up partnerships with other big cloud providers or ISVs – or head down the M&A route.

EMC, Joe Tucci, M&A, News & Analysis, Rodney Rogers, SAP, Virtustream

EMC to acquire SAP specialist Virtustream in cloud push

EMC is buying SAP cloud specialist Virtustream

EMC is buying SAP cloud specialist Virtustream

EMC announced this week that it will acquire Virtustream, a firm specialising in deploying SAP software in the cloud, for $1.2bn.

The all-cash deal will see Virtustream, a specialist in SAP software automation and cloud on-boarding, form EMC’s managed cloud services business and operate alongside other EMC businesses in the Federation including VMware and Pivotal, which offer their own cloud services.

Up until now EMC only sold on-premise cloud storage systems largely tuned for supporting VMware customers, offering them a hybrid cloud capability, and the company said the acquisition will enable it to bolster its capabilities in both private and public cloud.

“Virtustream is an exceptional company and this is a critical and transformative acquisition for EMC in one of the industry’s fastest-growing and most important sectors,” said Joe Tucci, EMC chairman and chief executive officer.

“With Virtustream in place, EMC will be uniquely positioned as a single source for our customers’ entire hybrid cloud infrastructure and services needs. We could not be more delighted that Virtustream will be joining the EMC Federation family. It’s a game changer,” Tucci said.

EMC also said it plans to offer Virtustream’s xStream cloud management software, which is already integrated with VMware vSphere, to its partners.

“Virtustream has established itself as an industry leader and innovator for running mission-critical enterprise applications in the cloud,” said Rodney Rogers, Virtustream chairman and chief executive officer.

“We’re proud to be joining the EMC Federation where our combined capabilities, products and services will allow us to accelerate our vision of delivering the platform of record for enterprise systems, and address the complete breadth of cloud computing needs,” Rogers said.

Virtustream’s unique sales point is its cloud workload management and automation software, which will almost certainly see deeper integration with similar offerings across the federation (particularly VMware’s).

The acquisition is a pretty significant step for the storage specialist which more recently, with the exception of Virtustream, has seemed more interested in acquiring its way deeper into infrastructure than software; the move is part of its broader goal, announced last year, of becoming more cloud-centric.