SAP HANA Blockchain was announced at SAPPHIRE NOW this year, along with the general availability of SAP Cloud Platform Blockchain service. Read the announcement here. The news is also on TechCrunch.

 

You might ask: what’s the difference?

Matt Zenus, Global VP, SAP HANA, summarized it during his SAPPHIRE NOW presentation (watch replay here): “SAP HANA is one of the first databases to natively connect to and consume blockchain information”. The keyword here is ‘consume’. SAP HANA Blockchain is NOT about building a blockchain network, it’s about bringing together business data and blockchain data, so that analysts can easily get a unified view of ALL data—including data in enterprise systems, and multi-party transactions on the blockchain network. Developers can also easily use the SAP HANA Platform to build applications incorporating blockchain data –without dealing with the complexities of blockchain technology.

On the other hand, SAP Cloud Platform Blockchain service is a blockchain-as-a-service offering, enabling customers to use open standards (currently supporting MultiChain and Hyperledger fabric) to create consortium and private blockchain networks.

 

Next question you may have: how does the two work together?

Andreas Schuster, SAP HANA Blockchain Product Manager, summarized it in his technical blog:

“SAP Cloud Platform Blockchain connects to any supported blockchain network via a cloud service on SAP Cloud Platform. SAP HANA Blockchain establishes a link between this cloud service and SAP HANA, which results in a representation of on-chain data in SAP HANA as a set of regular column store tables.”

“The interplay of the different components ensures that transactions submitted to the blockchain are replicated into SAP HANA. This replication works bi-directionally, meaning that transactions inserted in SAP HANA also find their way back to the blockchain, where they can be consumed by other applications.”

 

Why is it important?

Blockchain technology while driving innovation generates new data silos that needs to be unified with existing system of records. Especially at such early stage of adoption, companies can have some transactions executed on blockchain while executing others with different mechanisms.

For reporting and regulatory purposes all the data needs to consolidated, analyzed, and presented. To streamline processes, a single business application will have to interact with multiple transaction environments—including blockchain and traditional enterprise transaction systems.  A unified development and deployment platform is needed to support such hybrid application architecture.

With SAP HANA Blockchain, companies can leverage blockchain innovation for better trust, traceability, and transparency while getting real-time insights from all transactions and streamlining business processes across the entire business landscape.

 

By now, hopefully you are interested in learning a bit more about this new offering. If that’s the case, you can:

• Sign up for our upcoming webinar on July 18^th
• Register to get access to the upcoming beta program
• Email us at SAP_HANA_blockchain_service_beta_program@sap.com if you have additional questions

 

The post All you need to know about SAP HANA Blockchain (for now) in one place appeared first on SAP HANA.

source https://blogs.saphana.com/2018/06/26/need-know-sap-hana-blockchain-now-one-place/

As SAP, along with our partners, begins to build on the vision of the Intelligent Enterprise, I wanted to look back on what has made this possible. Obviously, the convergence of Big Data, IoT, Cloud Computing, and Mobility has created the perfect storm, in terms of bringing all the technology pieces together that are causing disruption and the need for transformation in the digital era.

But I’m going to make a bold statement—I absolutely believe the introduction of SAP HANA, just under 10 years ago, is a critical piece of the equation. This in-memory, relational database…which offers so much more…delivers (according to a recent SAP strategy document) “…the collection, connection, and orchestration of data as well as the integration and extension of processes within integrated applications.” Bottom line – SAP HANA handles big data better than anything else on the market and that has made all the difference for SAP, our partners, the marketplace, and the innovations based on the success of SAP HANA.

But rather than explain the technology or provide facts and figures to prove my point, I’d like some of our key partners to tell their stories.

VIRTUSTREAM SUPPORTS HUMAN PROGRESS

Virtustream provides cloud services for complex, mission-critical applications. Given that they serve the enterprise market, they have a lot of expertise around legacy systems and are experts at migrating and managing those systems with cost-effective infrastructure. According to Christina Colby, Senior Vice President, Strategic Alliances, “the key to success in the industry is fast time to market, which is why Virtustream combines enterprise-class cloud infrastructure and top-tier managed services with an industry-leading cloud management platform.”

By delivering a powerful, fast solution that’s ready for the enterprise, Virtustream gives customers a cloud that works for them and the assurance that their mission-critical legacy systems are secure, and running at top performance.

In addition, Virtustream gives customers room to disrupt, transform, innovate…and ultimately gain a competitive edge, because they don’t have to worry about their legacy IT systems. Virtustream customers are even now disrupting their own businesses.

• The company recently announced a strategic partnership with a Middle East service provider, to deliver enterprise-class “pay-as-you-grow” services that will help customers with their smart city initiatives and enable citizens, residents, and guests of the region to improve their quality of life.
• In addition, a biotechnology company, focused on genomic applications that serve academics, pharmaceutical development, and research needed to quickly deploy a new ERP system. Virtustream delivered hosting and services for SAP S/4HANA and Hybris on SAP HANA. Again, enabling companies to advance their IT and business in support of human progress.
• Finally, with Virtustream’s recent announcement of SAP Data Hub Service in the cloud, the company helped a major consumer packaged goods company integrate data from many different sources including SAP S/4HANA, SAP BW/4HANA, Hadoop. The service enables the company to make data driven decisions, gain insights to improve outcomes, and increase operational efficiency – all in an effort to better support their customers – and improve the world they service.

Virtustream—together with SAP and SAP HANA—provides customers with real solutions to tackle their most difficult IT challenges. They look forward to continuing their innovation with SAP, ensuring customers’ digital transformation journey is seamless and empowering.

ITRON CREATES A MORE RESOURCEFUL WORLD

Itron’s purpose is to create a more resourceful world, by transforming the way utilities and cities manage energy and water. With over 8,000 customers in more than 100 companies, Itron delivers one of the largest IoT solutions in the world – over 190 million intelligent devices deployed in the field.

Jay Millar, Director of Software and Services Sales, talked about Itron’s industry – Utilities and Smart Cities. “Think about it—utilities are going through a disruption Tsunami right now.” Jay went on to list the challenges facing the industry, including:

• Renewable power (with distributed energy production placing new challenges on the management of electricity distribution systems)
• Reduction in water loss after processing. Forty percent of water is lost after purification.
• Real-time gas pressure and quality monitoring to increase safety for gas utilities
• Increased customer expectations to understand their usage and empower them to make resourceful choices
• Regulatory changes
• Aging infrastructure and precious resources

Itron is developing solutions that enable a distribution network to adapt and react to changing conditions in real time. This network must have the intelligence to do what it can, when it needs to, and know when it needs help from the back office. This is the difference between “smart” and “active” solutions – Itron’s “active” solution is essentially the Intelligent Enterprise for utilities. And Itron is providing business outcomes that deliver to utilities’ and smart cities’ bottom line.

Itron chose SAP and SAP HANA, not only to provide a common data model for customers and simplify their solution, but because there’s so much more to SAP’s real-time database. Utilities collect a massive amount of data and there is no better real-time database than SAP HANA to handle this load.

SAP HANA seamlessly facilitates the utilization of both meter and billing data and creates links with other data sets such as, geospatial, weather, demographic, deployed assets and others, which are critical to identify inefficiencies and optimize utility operations and customer insights.

Itron believes their solution could help SAVE the utility industry, by giving them the platform to transform their business, especially as new power generation laws are passed. For example, utilities in California have the opportunity to re-invent themselves due to the law recently passed that makes solar mandatory in every new home.

In addition, the industry has been talking about innovation in cities for over a decade. Itron now has the technology to deliver these solutions alongside SAP. Together, Itron and SAP are creating a more resourceful world.

 

BIGID REDEFINES PERSONAL DATA PROTECTION AND PRIVACY

Privacy is a defining 21^st century problem. To do privacy effectively, you first need to know what and whose data you have, as well as the content and context. Once you solve the protection and privacy problem – you can solve the data governance problem and get critical insight around the data you have, where it resides, etc.

As technology companies are all too aware, the question of privacy and sensitivity of data is critical. Companies that don’t know what data they have around their clients or employees are at risk, because they can’t protect data they don’t know about. Not knowing doesn’t make data invisible…it makes it vulnerable. So, having insights around data is critical for the security and privacy of that data.

With major new regulations in Europe introducing significant penalties around privacy, data is the most important asset the modern digital enterprise has. BigID gives organizations a way to get value from that data while delivering privacy and protection and making enterprises effective stewards of their information.

BigID is the first major innovator to help companies find and understand their data and to leverage the best of machine learning and identity intelligence to give organizations a way to satisfy regulations like GDPR, but also gain a competitive advantage from the data organizations they gather and use.

From a technology perspective, BigID wanted to partner with a company that has the technological relevance and depth they needed. Apart from the common footprint of clients, they also had to have agile innovations built for purpose and the ability to plug their technology into the existing landscape, bringing immediate value to customers.

When you get right down to it, SAP’s customer base is BigID’s customer base – so it made sense from that perspective to look at their business model and technology. BigID wants to give companies a more automated way to satisfy privacy requirements like personal data rights while ensuring data security and effective data governance.

 

SEELOZ USES ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TO SAVE THE WORLD

The US and other developed countries currently waste up to 30% of all food and medicine produced. This translates into $100B annually, just in pharmaceutical waste in the US alone, and that’s a scary number. And this waste comes typically in four forms:

• Expirations
• Overstock
• Stock outs
• Cross-warehouse movements

The question is, why so much waste? We’re supposed to be at the forefront of technology maturity, but current food and healthcare supply chains fail to accurately forecast our demand. What makes things worse is the problem is occurring across all food and healthcare value chains. Manufacturers are battling to pace their production in a way that fits market demand. Distributors struggle to time and size procurement and can’t accurately stock warehouses to fulfill demand. And providers, including hospitals, supermarket and pharmacy chains are hardly able to determine demand from customers.

If we dig deep to get to the root cause of the problem, we can see the disconnect between ERPs and other systems that manage consumer data. In healthcare for example, hospitals implement two families of software systems: ERPs (and other operational systems of the same nature) and Electronic Medical Records. The problem is these systems don’t talk to each other, making operational decisions—particularly those related to procurement and inventory management—without a solid understanding of patient needs. Surprisingly, the same disconnect exists between Point of Sales and ERPs for retailers, distributors, and even manufacturers.

It’s an almost impossible problem to solve, but Seeloz absolutely believes Artificial Intelligence (AI) is going to save the world by solving problems that are beyond human capacity.

Let’s run the numbers. The supply chain team at a typical healthcare system must regularly procure about 100,000 to 250,000 surgery, pharmaceutical, and consumable goods from hundreds of different suppliers. Once they receive their orders, the team must then decide how to store each item between the main hospital warehouse and the numerous points of use across the hospital (ER, labs, clinics, etc). The complexity becomes exponential for healthcare systems with multiple facilities. In the world of inventory management systems, this translates into setting around 1-2M parameters per hospital location (PAR levels and recorder quantities) and this is exactly the type of problem in which AI-Driven Automation thrives.

While Seeloz spent a tremendous amount of time making their sure solutions were truly embeddable in supply chain workflows, they also needed a strong partner to:

1. Empower transactional systems for target clients
2. Establish a huge cloud capable of carrying all the ERP, EMR and POS data of the world,
3. Provide a strong in-memory database that could deliver the results of automation in near real time
4. Inspire a deep trust in clients and be viewed as the major catalyst for the Intelligent Enterprise across the world

Seeloz claims they couldn’t find a better partner than SAP. They now run their solutions on SAP Cloud Platform and seamlessly embed SAP HANA to help customers minimize waste in food and medicine. Together with SAP, Seeloz and AI will minimize waste and save the world.

 

SAP HANA PROVIDES THE FOUNDATION

As each of these partners demonstrate, being successful in the digital era requires a completely new way of thinking. And just as our partners are disrupting the standardized thinking and traditional practices within their industries, SAP’s introduction of SAP HANA turned the database world on its head, setting the groundwork for the introduction of SAP S/4 HANA, SAP Cloud Platform, and now HANA Data Management Suite.

The Intelligent Enterprise is a vision that has its roots in the introduction of SAP HANA. This in-memory database provided the foundation for the inspiring innovation that came afterward. As SAP—together with our partners—works to realize the vision of the Intelligent Enterprise, the legacy of HANA guides our progress and secures our future.

The post Setting the Stage for the Intelligent Enterprise appeared first on SAP HANA.

source https://blogs.saphana.com/2018/06/18/setting-the-stage-for-the-intelligent-enterprise/

As announced at Sapphire (or if you didn’t hear, watch the replay here) SAP HANA Data Management Suite reduces the complexity of delivering secure, governed enterprise applications and analytics. This is delivered via an open, on-premises, hybrid, and multi-cloud enabled solution suite that orchestrates all your data into a trusted, unified landscape. It gives customers:

• Trusted data:  Data that customers can rely on to make business decisions
• Connected, intelligent data: A single, unified view enabling advanced applications and data management
• Cloud and architecture flexibility: Cloud freedom for data systems, applications, and system development

I had the chance to sit down with Ken Tsai, Global VP and Head of Product Marketing, Database and Data Management at SAP, to dive into how he sees the cloud and architecture flexibility of SAP HANA Data Management Suite benefiting SAP customers.

It was interesting speaking with customers at Sapphire and hearing the variety of progress they’d made on their journey to the cloud. From your experience, what sort of use cases lend themselves best to the cloud and what particular challenges are customers encountering?

Looking at it from the perspective of a holistic integrated data management solution, it makes sense that when we have data that’s originated in the cloud we should keep it and manage it directly in the cloud. But this presents some challenges that the technology vendors need to solve—like how to manage data across multiple clouds.

Speaking with customers, we found they don’t just have one cloud, they have multiple clouds and this cloud data coming from multiple places (like SaaS solutions, for example a CRM service). So the reality is that customer’s raw data is spread across multiple clouds these days.

The promise of a consolidated logical view of the data element is important, but it can’t be achieved by forcing all data into one cloud. We know that’s not feasible. We learned that lesson 20 years ago, when everybody in the world was trying to consolidate data into one single data warehouse! Today management of data across multiple cloud properties is about orchestrating data movement, in a process flow fashion from one cloud to the other. Refining and enriching it (the data), and tracking it’s lineage and usage. So when you consume the data you actually have assurance of where that data came from and that refinement process has already happened—this lets you can confidently take action based on the data.

 

How can a cloud or cloud/on-premises environment benefit traditional on-premises SAP customers?

One thing I want to recommend to all SAP or non-SAP customers is to actually look beyond the deployment options. Certainly putting software in the cloud simplifies management of the software lifecycle, makes it readily available, and more elastic—that’s a given, its table stakes. And this is true whether it’s a database platform-as-a-service or software-as-a-service application.

We should also look at the growing accessibility of different operations and services that are already delivered in the cloud through either APIs or deeper functional integrations. Today, think about the possibility of creating an integrated data processing system, between SAP HANA as a Service (directly in the cloud) and let’s say it was a best-of-breed machine learning framework, like Google Tensor Flow. Directly running on one of the most advanced IaaS and optimized to run on CPU, , GPU or even TPU, you have the freedom and flexibility. The platform would be a collection of technology solutions all operating in the cloud, but that piece of different functionality, it would be completely dependent on customer choice. It’s up to vendors like SAP to make sure that our different technologies works seamlessly with third party and open source technologies already running the cloud, because ultimately, meeting the customers’ needs and will drive innovation across the board.

 

And what about hybrid (cloud/on-premises) workloads?

So just like I talked about, having a database platform as a service deployed in the cloud, you have the benefit of integrating with any native cloud functionality that’s provided from any third party. But if you think about this logically, what does that mean?

It benefits a lot of customers that may have data spread across on-premises and in the cloud. If for whatever reason they can’t move all the data directly into the cloud, they can still create a private instance of that data set directly in the cloud and enjoy the benefits of the different data computing capability in the cloud.

My favorite example, which you may have heard me share before, has always been Google Photos. Think about the possibility of the data set that any on-premises customer has, even stored on a laptop. Having that automatically processed and enhanced, providing a value added-service back to the user, is incredible.

Consider a marketing or sales team sharing data in the cloud…This data can automatically go through a “do not call” list, or go through a comparison to existing contacts who are already in the sales pipeline to avoid interrupting current sales process. This data use authorization traditionally took two, three, or even four weeks to process. But with the CRM in the cloud, do-not-call list sitting somewhere else, and contact list from events in your mobile, you can actually demand this business-level cloud computing services to give you the answer you want immediately.

 

You’ve touched on it already, but to summarize, why is a multi-cloud deployment strategy important?

From the customer’s perspective, having the freedom of cloud choice is very, very important. As technology advances and government regulation continues to be solidified (even on a regional basis, such as GDPR) it’s becomes a necessity to have the means to actually alter that or change platform very easily down the road, since nobody knows what the future holds.

This is not about just putting your data in the cloud, but having the freedom to move the data, the data processing system and the applications from one cloud to the other and even potentially back to on-premises. That’s really the core of what the customer needs in our completely connected cloud world.

 

So how can the cloud accelerate innovation?

I think cloud is one of those catalysts that makes everything faster, just because it’s already available. I remember the early days, I was doing programming, and maintaining the software was always an issue, updating it and making it available, and accessing it. But that is all gone, now you’re really focusing on the value-added application and the ability that we want to build on top of it.

I fundamentally believe that everything will go the route of cloud in the future, but doesn’t mean that everything goes in to one single public cloud. The data centers themselves will translate into a private cloud environment as we mature these technologies stacks.

The principles of simplicity and eliminating latency and redundancy that you can see in data-driven applications, will ultimately drive the requirement of these technology solutions going forward for business use.

 

What’s the simplest way for someone to start their cloud journey with SAP?

I love this question. I think, just like any cloud options, the simplest way to actually engage and start their journey within SAP is by trying it. With SAP HANA as a service (link), the software’s there, the capability’s there, the trial system’s there and accessing it is not a long cycle of waiting the software to arrive, then waiting for the next version to arrive. With the cloud-oriented paradigm, this is all delivered directly to the customer upfront, and this is why I’m excited about building software solutions directly in the cloud.

Evaluating different capabilities and finding the right fit up-front (rather than doing it as a post-sales process) benefits customers. And from solution provider perspective, it is only through these continuous learning in user and system behaviour will we figure out future improvement and automation opportunities.

 

Well thank you so much Ken for all your insights! On that note, customers should take advantage of SAP HANA as a Service on the SAP Cloud Platform and can learn more about the SAP HANA Data Management Suite.

The post Embracing Cloud for Integrated Data Management—Not Just Database Deployment appeared first on SAP HANA.

source https://blogs.saphana.com/2018/06/15/embracing-cloud-for-integrated-data-management-not-just-database-deployment/

As technologies evolve, they typically pass through different stages of maturity, both from a technical and a business perspective. They move from pilot project to a whole new way of working, from an idea to a bold vision to disruptive innovations. New technologies often generate extensive hype before they have gained traction and realized their full potential with tangible solutions. This is also true for the blockchain technology, which while it has matured and is moving beyond the experimental phase, still faces a level of uncertainty in the market.

Particularly in the enterprise world, it is a challenge for businesses to know how they can best take advantage of this technology. At the same time, the potential is so remarkable that, according to a survey by the World Economic Forum, by 2027, 10% of the global gross domestic product (GDP) will be stored on blockchain technology. In any case, the idea of decentralized applications that share and distribute control, resources, and data in order to benefit from the network effect and greater transparency and trust within a network, remains a promising opportunity to establish new business models.

Enabling enterprise blockchains

Many people consider blockchain to be one of the most significant innovations in the IT industry, while others consider its biggest strength – that there is no central control – to also be its greatest weakness. However, the majority of enterprise blockchains are consortium or semi-private blockchains. These types allow either a pre-selected group or a single organization to control and run the network and the according consensus mechanisms.

When companies start exploring the appliance of blockchain technologies, it should not just be for the sake of applying a new technology. Blockchain offers companies an opportunity to rethink their business processes, with significant potential to speed up existing processes, even across corporate boundaries.

Enterprise blockchains have the power to further simplify and accelerate business processes through reduced process steps and greater transaction consistency. From the trading of digital or physical goods to verifying documents and milestones of a specific process, applying blockchain-empowered solutions in the enterprise world can lead to increased profitability.

With SAP HANA®, we have the unique ability to enable enterprise blockchains and integrate them with new and existing business applications so customers can take full advantage of the technology’s benefits. Therefore, our goal is to embed blockchain in our multi-modal architecture and have blockchain-related processes appear as a typical database transaction to both humans and machines – taking out complexity and inefficiency, but ensuring the speed, reliability, and security that enterprises require to run their businesses smoothly.

Introducing the SAP HANA Blockchain adapter

At SAPPHIRE this year, we launched a first version of the SAP HANA Blockchain adapter integrating with the newly launched SAP Cloud Platform Blockchain. With this new capability, customers can easily consume and build on blockchain data in SAP HANA using an SQL interface and standard SQL commands – both on-premise or in the cloud. This consistent user experience makes it much easier for developers to build new applications using the blockchain technology because they do not need to be aware of the very concrete blockchain implementation details, but are empowered to simply apply them. By removing this barrier for developers, SAP HANA enables them to easily and quickly adopt blockchain, providing an enterprise-class data platform that harmonizes multi-party transactions and allowing customers to establish trustful and transparent business processes and networks.

In addition to connecting to existing blockchain networks, such as Hyperledger Fabric or Multichain, via APIs offered by SAP Cloud Platform Blockchain, customers can now take advantage of the relevant data from the blockchain network with the speed of SAP HANA. This data from the blockchains is provided in the form of virtual tables in SAP HANA and can also be replicated into physical tables. In addition, blockchain transactions triggered through SAP HANA are submitted to the respective blockchain ecosystem. On the other hand, for any additions to the relevant blockchain, the corresponding blockchain table in SAP HANA will be updated accordingly.

This makes it possible to run analytics and transactions in real-time on both regular business data and blockchain data – making blockchain enterprise-ready by integrating the technology with new and existing business applications. All these operations can be performed utilizing standard SQL commands since blockchain data resides in database tables.

 

SAP HANA Blockchain Adapter connects with blockchains through SAP Cloud Platform and brings together business with blockchain data

With this new capability of SAP HANA, companies can increase, for example, the supply chain transparency by extending order processing information to suppliers. Further use cases are applicable in the public sector, for example with document verification, or in the utilities industry with, among others, the tracking of electricity production and consumption in the private sector where people can trade rooftop solar power with other households.

As a next step, we will explore further use cases with customers in a controlled beta phase for the SAP HANA Blockchain adapter.

Making use of the blockchain technology in the enterprise world is a further step towards decentralizing applications for greater flexibility, transparency, and scalability in and for the hyper-connected economy.

The post SAP HANA Goes Blockchain – Bringing Together Business and Blockchain Data appeared first on SAP HANA.

source https://blogs.saphana.com/2018/06/12/sap-hana-goes-blockchain-bringing-together-business-and-blockchain-data/