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VolkerHaentjes
Employee
Employee

Only recently, a German television magazine unveiled that no others than the U.S. security agencies CIA and NSA are using software solutions based on the SAP HANA® platform. This is especially remarkable since most people would expect that particularly U.S. authorities prefer a database made in the U.S. Well – they don’t, for obvious reasons. SAP HANA is a database platform that is currently unparalleled. It enables companies and organizations to analyze large amounts of data, both structured and unstructured, in real time. And consequently, more and more of these companies and organizations replace their legacy databases with SAP HANA, realizing incredible cost and performance benefits while simplifying their IT infrastructure as well as exploring innovative business processes and new business models at the same time. Let me present just a few:

EMC

EMC Corporation, based in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, USA, is a trusted partner to many businesses and services providers, helping them store, manage, protect, and analyze their information. To manage growth, the company’s objective was to implement a cost-effective, sustainable data management solution. The company launched SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW) on an Oracle database in an effort to support ETL processes and analytics for its SAP Business Suite applications.

With the intent of enabling the most accurate and current data possible, EMC originally planned to run hourly loads for some key data elements. But long load times limited them to running only 10 batch loads per day. Even at this reduced level, batch loads were not always complete by the start of the next business day – deepening user frustration and preventing IT from meeting its service-level agreements.

The company reduced their data-set size by moving data from an Oracle database to use the near-line storage capabilities of SAP® IQ software and deployed the SAP Business Warehouse application powered by SAP HANA®. Then it stored historical data on SAP IQ. The key benefits were amazing: As a result of the tight integration between SAP BW, SAP HANA, and SAP IQ, maintenance efforts would be dramatically reduced and data access times shortened. EMC significantly accelerated batch load times, allowing to double the number of batch load runs, thus providing real-time access to accurate, updated information.

Within six months, the data housed on Oracle had been reduced from 7 TB to 4.5 TB – and was eventually compressed to just 800 GB of in-memory data after the migration to SAP HANA. The result: EMC had 2 TB of memory storage capabilities – allowing for up to 1.5 TB of memory utilization across its real-time data platform. Michael Harding, Lead SAP Technical Architect at EMC IT noted: “Thanks to SAP HANA, our business has more faith in the data that it’s running reports against. In the past, the validity of our data was in question, due to unpredictable load times.”

Molson Coors

Molson Coors, a U.S. brewing company based in Denver, Colorado, wanted to provide their business users access to the information they need in a timely manner. Their goal was to run financial reports daily to better understand critical sales activity. Unfortunately, their Oracle database was too slow and inflexible to reach this benchmark. Therefore, Molson Coors migrated their SAP BW application to the SAP HANA platform in just two days and deployed the SAP BusinessObjects™ Business Intelligence platform for reporting.

The result was a simpler IT architecture, requiring less space and reducing total cost of ownership: Database size was reduced by more than 80%, from the 4.6 TB Oracle database to 900 GB with SAP HANA, cube loading in SAP BW was up to ten times faster, and the IT department was able to shorten development times for new prototypes by 80% and cut planning effort by half. Molson is now able to create new reports without constantly changing their cube or re-materialize the data, which significantly increased their throughput.

With the real-time data access achieved, Molson Coors is now able to make faster, more informed business decisions and to analyze customer sentiment based on data gathered from social media channels. Lyne Strasbourg, Global BI Business Alignment Lead at Molson Coors said: “SAP BW and SAP HANA have increased performance in key areas of our data warehouse while significantly simplifying many of our IT tasks. We are able to deliver information to users more efficiently and develop new solutions twice as fast. It has provided us with a solid base for globalizing and standardizing business processes.”

SHS Group

SHS Group, an Irish company producing beverages, spices and desserts, needed a deeper view into product performance, sales activity, and market trends. Unfortunately, slow data load times and inflexible reporting made it cumbersome to access detailed sales information. SHS therefore desired to establish an IT platform that facilitates innovation, streamlines operations, and speeds growth. Ideally, it should improve overall IT performance and reduce maintenance costs and effort and enable faster, more flexible reporting for sales and finance.

After moving its SAP BW application from an Oracle database to the SAP HANA platform, reporting is now more than 100 times faster than before, while report generation time went down from three minutes to less than two seconds on average. The result is a better user experience, increased user adoption, and greater business productivity, together with fewer system administration requirements and lower costs. At the same time, SHS’s data footprint was reduced by a factor of 6, coming down from 661 GB with Oracle to 100 GB with SAP HANA. John McLarnon, Head of Information Systems and Technology at SHS Group said: “Given the huge success and immediate benefits realized by our migration of SAP BW to SAP HANA, I look forward to the next phase of our data analytics vision and strategy.”

Transnet

Transnet Group, South Africa’s national freight logistics company, plays a crucial role in sustaining industries and economies across the continent. To keep maritime operations running efficiently, Transnet National Ports Authority measures the speed of cargo loading and unloading with SAP BW powered by SAP HANA.

Transnet looked for a single source of reference to enable real-time access to accurate data and predictive business analysis for informed decision making. Since switching from an Oracle database to the SAP HANA platform, reporting is now significantly faster. Report execution performance dramatically improved by 90%, with continued improvements expected after installing a 10 GB switch. Finally, executive confidence in the accuracy of their data-driven strategy was restored, thanks to SAP HANA.

Mmutle Lentle, CIO at Transnet, said: “With SAP HANA, Transnet shortened report turnaround from 8 days to 35 minutes and can now dissect the data in real time to predict future trends. This allows our management to make better, more timely business decisions, which help us reduce costs and improve our services to customers.”

Summary

As you can see from our customers, SAP HANA isn’t just a faster database, it’s a game changer that supports organizations creating new apps and analytic reports to make better informed decisions and therefore stay ahead of what their businesses need. SAP HANA can do this, and only SAP HANA can.

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