SAP SE today announced new business services and key functions for SAP HANA Cloud Platform, making it the agile cloud innovation platform for enterprises worldwide.

SAP HANA Cloud Platform Updates and Early Adopter Versions of First Deliverables of Partnership with Apple Help Customers Achieve Business Excellence, Attain Enterprise Optimization and Empower Digital Transformation

SAP HANA

The new features include support for virtual machines, prebuilt integrations for Ariba Cloud Integration Gateway, beta versions of workflow and business rules services as well as smart data streaming for high-speed Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios. These features enable enterprises to bridge on-premise and cloud landscapes, extend existing technology investments to deliver channels such as mobile and IoT and drive new digital transformation initiatives. Additionally, SAP announced it has reached the first milestones in its partnership with Apple with the delivery of early-adopter programs for the new SAP HANA Cloud Platform SDK for iOS and SAP Academy for iOS.

“We are extending our enterprise platform-as-a-service leadership by supporting our customers and partners through their digital transformation journey as they strive to become an agile business and optimize their business processes end-to-end,” said Bjoern Goerke, president, SAP HANA Cloud Platform, SAP. “The new business services can help our customers to fully embrace their innovation agenda at development speed and deployment flexibility that they have never seen from SAP before, making our SAP HANA Cloud Platform even more attractive to enterprises on their digital transformation journey.”

In cooperation with SAP, Robert Bosch GmbH (Bosch) has recently announced the launch of a new parking app for truckers, Bosch Secure Truck Parking. “We are bringing the parking lot to the Internet,” said Jan-Philip Weers, manager of the truck parking project at Bosch. “Leveraging technology from Bosch in conjunction with SAP HANA Cloud Platform, we developed an IoT solution that connects people, processes and businesses. It allows parking lot operators to share available parking spots and drivers to reserve spots and park their trucks efficiently throughout their road trips. This solution is keeping truck drivers and cargos safe across Europe while potentially saving billions in cargo theft.”

New Features Connect More People, Processes and Businesses

Added integration accelerates access to applications running on SAP HANA Cloud Platform. It includes:

  • SAP HANA Cloud Platform virtual machine helps customers bring more applications into the cloud. It helps complete solution landscapes by adding workloads based on existing on-premise software or languages and runtimes that run directly on SAP HANA Cloud Platform.
  • Ariba Cloud Integration Gateway will have prebuilt cloud integrations for plugging SAP HANA Cloud Platform into Ariba Network, the vast customer and supplier network. This will make it easier to connect buyers and sellers for secure transactions. Ariba Cloud Integration Gateway will be generally available in a few weeks.
  • SAP API Business Hub provides a catalog of APIs of SAP solutions. New APIs are added daily to make it even easier to build and test new functionality and applications. Examples of new APIs include the SAP S/4HANA Finance solution, the SAP S/4HANA Marketing Cloud solution, the SAP Hybris Product Content Management solution and the SAP Vehicles Network solution.

New Business Services Enable Companies to Develop and Extend Applications

  • SAP HANA Cloud Platform, workflow service, in the beta version enables the fast, easy connection between business functions. Its graphical interface enables business analysts to create workflows quickly to orchestrate a sequence of tasks across different users and organizations.
  • SAP HANA Cloud Platform Business rules in the beta version will enable business and key users to change and embed business logic into a business process without rewriting the application. This functionality increases flexibility and ease in tweaking business processes without downtime or negative business impact.
  • SAP Data Quality Management, microservices for location data, help ensure clean data by providing data validation and enrichment for addresses and geocodes within any application or environment. It will be generally available in a few weeks.

New Capabilities to Help Companies Detect, Process and Report Events

  • SAP HANA Cloud Platform, smart data streaming, analyzes and transforms high-velocity, high-volume data streams in real time, allowing applications to detect and respond to changing conditions in real time. Smart data streaming provides the basis to compute and capture useful information in the SAP HANA platform.
  • The SAP Smart Business service provides business users easy access and management of critical key performance indicators to monitor business processes in real time and take action.
  • SAP HANA Cloud Platform predictive services is a set of readily-integrated Web services that delivers predictive analytics insights to applications running on SAP HANA Cloud platform. Using the automated predictive library of SAP HANA, data scientists do not need to build models from scratch and users can benefit from advanced insights readily available in apps running on SAP HANA Cloud Platform.

First Deliverables of Partnership with Apple for Native Mobile Development and Deployment

SAP and Apple announced a partnership 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.

  • SAP HANA Cloud Platform SDK for iOS – An early-adopter program for the new software development kit (SDK) is currently being rolled out to select customers and partners. The SDK provides developers, partners and customers the tools to build their own enterprise-grade native apps for iPhone and iPad quickly and efficiently. This will help boost development productivity and quality, and deliver live data to people wherever and whenever they work.
  • SAP Academy for iOS – A preview version of the new academy is available to select customers and partners. Designed to provide the education, training and tools to enable the SAP ecosystem of developers to take full advantage of the deliverables of the SAP and Apple partnership, the academy is planned for availability in Spring 2017. Initial content for the academy includes mobile developer support for the SAP HANA Cloud Platform SDK for iOS that focuses on how to build native apps for iPhone and iPad using the SAP Fiori for iOS design language. Training is also provided for designers for SAP Fiori for iOS based on specific design guidelines.
  • Customer MAPAL, a manufacturer of precision tools, is a part of the early adopter program and has taken advantage of the new methodology and design approach of the SDK to build a native iOS app using Swift. Based on SAP HANA Cloud Platform, the SDK can make the management of data more efficient and transparent, and transform interaction with MAPAL’s customers. The company’s tool managers can now view relevant information about a tool on their iPad and tap into additional services anywhere, at any time through a modern user interface, designed with SAP Fiori for iOS, which can be used as intuitively as any consumer app.