SAP ecosystem is opening up with HANA

ORLANDO, USA: Working closely with an active open ecosystem, SAP AG is empowering customers, partners, startups and developers worldwide to innovate easily on top of the SAP HANA platform, a SAPPHIRE update tells.

By fostering strategic collaborations with partners, including Red Hat, IBM, HP and VMware, as well as startups, SAP plans to offer customers broader choice, ease of deployment and simplified IT environments, empowering them to transform their businesses by leveraging the advanced capabilities of SAP HANA. The announcement was made at SAPPHIRE NOW, being held June 3-5, 2014, in Orlando, Florida.

It explains how SAP has expanded the operating system options for SAP HANA by certifying it for production use on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, including Intel Ivy Bridge support. This empowers customers to achieve business performance and innovation while retaining their choice of IT architectures, it added.

Additionally, SAP plans to enable enterprises seeking to leverage the power of the public cloud for their data management needs to be able to take advantage of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP HANA on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace. SAP and Red Hat are collaborating with the aim that SAP licensees working on the AWS cloud would soon be able to consume Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP HANA on demand.

"We are excited to collaborate with SAP to accelerate the adoption of SAP HANA by offering Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP HANA," said Jim Totton, vice president and general manager, Platform Business Unit, Red Hat. "For the first time, SAP customers have a choice in operating system platforms for deploying real-time data management and application solutions."

Meanwhile, SAP and IBM continue to collaborate closely with the intent to enable SAP HANA to run on the IBM Power technology, including POWER7+ and the newly introduced POWER8 system on Linux. The companies ultimately aim to benefit customers that run their mission-critical SAP applications on IBM Power Systems. SAP and IBM have announced a limited test and evaluation program for SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems, allowing selected customers to test SAP HANA on IBM POWER Systems with Suse Linux, leveraging existing IT infrastructure investments while driving innovation using technologies such as SAP HANA.

SAP HANA on VMware vSphere 5.5 is now generally available for single virtual machine (VM) running on a dedicated SAP HANA certified server for production use. SAP is also releasing the scenario of multiple virtual machines on SAP HANA certified servers for production use as controlled availability.

Additionally, there is the SAP Startup Focus program aims to drive adoption of the SAP HANA platform outside of the traditional SAP ecosystem. The program provides startups with access to the technology, support and resources needed to build new applications or port existing applications on top of SAP HANA. Currently there are more than 1,500 startups participating, with more than 100 validated solutions across multiple industries available for SAP customers to evaluate and buy. This year, more than 20 customers have purchased the startup solutions, generating more than US$10 million in revenue for participating startups.