SAP (News - Alert) AG has rolled out two new solutions built on the company's in-memory computing platform, SAP HANA. The SAP Smart Meter Analytics software and the SAP COPA Accelerator software were announced at the company's SAP TechEd 2011 event in Las Vegas.

The SAP HANA platform is enabling SAP to renew its existing applications while also offering a new class of applications. The new products were developed by SAP product and design teams that worked in close collaboration with the company's customers. They used design-thinking principles that work from the end user's needs backwards.

The applications were designed to give customers insight into "big data," enabling them to leverage large amounts of information for analysis, planning, forecasting and simulations in a natural way versus traditional time-consuming, sequential approaches, which may be rigid. The new solutions are part of the SAP BusinessObjects Strategic Workforce Planning application, which was announced at the end of last year.

The SAP HANA platform enables companies to run complex analyses like simulations and pattern recognition within seconds. It may be deployed as an appliance or delivered through the cloud, and offers a number of core features, including: a single database with native support for row and columnar data stores; a powerful and flexible data calculation engine; SQL and MDX interfaces; a unified information modeling design environment; a data repository to persist views of business information; data integration capabilities for accessing SAP and non-SAP data sources and integrated lifecycle management.

The MSPWorld event, collocated with ITEXPO West, focused on cloud computing trends as well as support for managed service providers and their respective ecosystems.

The new SAP Smart Meter Analytics solution is designed to help utility companies turn their vast volume of data into powerful insights that can be used to develop more tailored customer offerings. The new in-memory solution enables utilities to help customers adopt more sustainable energy-use practices with planned capabilities. Real-time access to smart meter data also allows companies to improve fraud detection capabilities and load forecasts as well as design new rate structures to correspond with energy use patterns.

The SAP COPA Accelerator software helps improve the speed and depth of working with large amounts of financial data. Planned functionality will aid in a number of areas, including: performing real-time profitability reporting for large-scale data volumes; conducting instant, on-the-fly analysis of profitability data; running cost allocations at significantly faster processing times and empowering business users with easy, self-service access to profitability information.

In conjunction with the new solutions, the company has also launched a new SAP HANA website featuring demos, solution briefs and collaborations with customers and product experts. The site offers a community experience and is designed to share knowledge and insights and enable participants to implement SAP HANA.

"There is a massive simplification happening all around us," said Dr. Vishal Sikka, executive board member, technology and innovation, SAP AG. "Layers are being dissolved at an unbelievable pace; people, businesses, data and machines are becoming more directly connected. This virtuous cycle of connectedness leads to disintermediation of layers, which drives end users to become more empowered and demand better user-experience — challenging us to create more connectedness."

"This is leading to a fundamental renewal and reshaping in the IT industry, and SAP HANA is helping to drive this change," added Sikka. "SAP HANA removes the inefficiencies and layers that have developed over time, but also finally delivers the unbelievable user experience, simultaneously enabling new horizons and simplification of the existing layers of complexity, without disruption. The incredible customer response is proof that we are delivering this renewal with SAP HANA, and these applications are just the beginning of what we will do."

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