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    SAP Begins Migrating Ariba to HANA Platform

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    Four Steps to a Big Data Strategy

    The fact that SAP is moving its Ariba e-commerce network onto the SAP in-memory computing platform HANA shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. But what will be of profound significance is the analytics capability that Ariba customers will soon have at their disposal.

    Tim Minahan, CMO for SAP Cloud, says the first step involves moving the Ariba Spend Visibility application to SAP HANA. In quick succession, SAP then plans to put the entire Ariba network on HANA, which should provide some interesting new real-time capabilities.

    For example, Minahan says it will soon be possible to analyze the impact that an event happening half way around the world, such as flooding in Thailand or a tsunami in Japan, will have on the supply chain. In addition, customers should also be able to correlate data in a way that makes it easier to spot potentially fraudulent transactions.

    With 15 years of transaction histories to work with, Minahan notes that Ariba is also going to be a primary source of Big Data for identifying all kinds of business trends once that data becomes accessible to analytics applications running on HANA. That data, which is being made accessible to users via SAP Lumira data visualization software, will now load 30 times faster on HANA.

    Before too long, SAP plans to have millions of users on SAP HANA; it’s just that many of them may never actually realize it because they will be accessing HANA via a cloud application service such as Ariba. But whether they know it or not, a quantum leap in analytics capabilities is about to fundamentally change the way businesses of all sizes operate.

    Mike Vizard
    Mike Vizard
    Michael Vizard is a seasoned IT journalist, with nearly 30 years of experience writing and editing about enterprise IT issues. He is a contributor to publications including Programmableweb, IT Business Edge, CIOinsight and UBM Tech. He formerly was editorial director for Ziff-Davis Enterprise, where he launched the company’s custom content division, and has also served as editor in chief for CRN and InfoWorld. He also has held editorial positions at PC Week, Computerworld and Digital Review.

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