SAP HANA® Platform Will Support the New Intel Distribution of Apache Hadoop to Power Real-Time Insights from Massive Data Sets

Dubai, United Arab Emirates - February 28, 2013 - Building on a long relationship of joint collaboration, SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced a technical and business partnership with Intel that will help organizations in data-intensive industries become more competitive and agile by leveraging insights across business operations from all their data assets at the pace of business. The two companies plan to build and bring to market a breakthrough "big data" solution for enterprise customers centered on the SAP HANA® platform and Intel® Distribution for Apache™ Hadoop® software. The combination will integrate innovations and software technologies from SAP, Intel and the open source community to store and analyze in real-time large volumes of structured and unstructured data from across the enterprise. This announcement was made from the Strata Conference, being held February 26-28 in Santa Clara, Calif.

"Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) is inherently batch oriented, as are most Hadoop tools. This imposes fundamental limitations on the speed and frequency with which data can be loaded into or retrieved from HDFS via Hadoop tools," said Philip Russom, research director for Data Management, The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI). "Hadoop workers deal with Hadoop's inherent data latency in a variety of ways. For data that needs on-demand, real-time access, they manage the data in a database management system, whenever possible."

SAP plans to leverage the in-memory technology innovations in SAP HANA as well as Intel's innovations in security, connectivity and management tools for Apache Hadoop to bring a unique solution to market. The planned major technology components of the solution include integral parts of the SAP® Real-time Data Platform, along with Intel Hadoop software.

"SAP is reinventing the information processing landscape with SAP HANA - from business analytics and data warehousing, to enterprise applications and SAP Business Suite, and next to 'big data' with Intel Hadoop," said Franz Faerber, head of Data Management, SAP. "Together, SAP and Intel have a strong vision to bring significant innovations, enterprise IT maturity and go-to market efficiencies that will enable organizations to easily adopt an enterprise-class big data solution."

"The extension of our partnership with SAP will create a well-engineered solution leveraging combined in-memory and processor optimizations," said Boyd Davis, vice president and general manager of the Datacenter Software Division, Intel Corp. "Furthermore, the big data solution from SAP and Intel will provide the necessary enterprise-ready integration, optimization and configuration - right out of the box - that eliminates adoption barriers arising from complexities and expenses involved in making big data solutions enterprise-ready."

A recent survey by TDWI indicates that 62 percent of enterprises indicate inadequate staffing or skills for big data analytics as a major barrier to adoption of technologies like Hadoop¹. The combined solution will enable enterprises to continue to use the tools and expertise they already have in-house. Furthermore, customers across many industries, including retail, financial services and telecommunications, can expect significant benefits from integrating Hadoop into operational systems.

The partnership with Intel intends to extend the SAP ecosystem of existing partnerships and previously announced innovations around big data. While certain intellectual property assets created specifically for the big data solution would remain proprietary to SAP, some key innovations are planned to be contributed back to the Hadoop open source community and the SAP ecosystem of big data partners.

Upcoming phases of the big data solution from SAP and Intel are planned to enable integrated query processing, optimized data loading, and unified administration.

About SAP
As market leader in enterprise application software, SAP (NYSE: SAP) helps companies of all sizes and industries run better. From back office to boardroom, warehouse to storefront, desktop to mobile device - SAP empowers people and organizations to work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively to stay ahead of the competition. SAP applications and services enable more than 232,000 customers to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and grow sustainably. For more information, visit www.sap.com. 

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© Press Release 2013