Ask Approyo: What are some advantages to in-memory computing technology in SAP HANA?

The SAP HANA platform permits online transaction processing and online analytical processing workloads using a single data copy on a single platform. It stores data in high-speed memory, organizes it in columns, and partitions and distributes it among multiple servers. This delivers faster queries that aggregate data more efficiently while avoiding costly full-table scans, materialized views, and analytic indexes.

Run smarter – SAP HANA enables true market differentiation by unlocking new growth opportunities, boosting competitiveness, and inventing new data-driven business models for increased market share. Imagine the increased effectiveness of your knowledge workers when they have real-time information about accounts payable and receivable. They can spend more time on higher-value activities and less time on clerical work.

Run faster – SAP HANA dramatically speeds up your core business processes for reduced operational costs, driving business at the speed of the market and boosting responsiveness. Removing the constraints of batch-driven processes enables processing and decision making to happen in the moment, dramatically changing the way you drive your business.

Run simpler – SAP HANA helps you simplify business processes with immediate insight to action for improved effectiveness, empowering people to decide and act in the business moment and boost productivity. Combining transactions and analysis in one single database enables simplification of IT, leading to lower costs and greater efficiency

Try SAP HANA and Approyo today
Approyo is the leader in SAP HANA and S/4HANA deployments. Bring your data and licenses, we’ll set up a POC/sandbox in our environment for you to see how SAP HANA works in the cloud and can help your business. Get started today..

Concur to acquire travel startup Hipmunk

The SAP ecosystem continues to evolve with the latest news that Concur will be acquiring Hipmunk. One of the best things about Hipmunk is the ability to search planning tools to book travel, which is something Concur will now be able to integrate into its software.

Hear from Approyo CEO, Christopher Carter, as he shares his opinion about this big announcement.
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Concur, an SAP company and the world's leading provider of integrated travel and expense management solutions, announced on September 14 that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Hipmunk, a leader in travel search innovation. The Hipmunk team and their innovations will further Concur's strategy to deliver consumer-grade products to corporate customers. The transaction is expected to close in October 2016.

As evident in Concur's recent acquisition of TripIt, development of ExpenseIt and investment in ClearTrip, Concur has a long-held strategy of partnering with, investing in, acquiring or building consumer apps. These investments yield learnings and capabilities that enable Concur to ultimately deliver consumer-grade products to corporate customers.

Here is what Elena Donio, President of Concur has to say about this announcement:

"We are excited to welcome Hipmunk, the innovation leader in travel search, to the Concur and SAP family," said Elena Donio, President of Concur. "Concur has always strived to provide the best experience for travelers on our platform and we're confident Hipmunk will continue to delight consumers while informing the innovation agenda for our corporate clients."

Who is Hipmunk?
Hipmunk is known for delivering some of the most innovative functionality in the travel industry, particularly features and functionality that are highly relevant to and beloved by frequent travelers. The company was the first to create a website and mobile app that sorts travel results not just by price, but also key factors that are important to business travelers such as duration, stops and hotel location. Additionally, its calendar integration and hotel map search allow business travelers to easily see the best hotel and flight options based on meeting time and location. Lastly, Hipmunk is a leader in the cutting edge space of artificial intelligence-powered travel search and travel bots.

About Concur
Concur, an SAP company, imagines the way the world should work, offering cloud-based services that make it simple to manage travel and expenses. By connecting data, applications and people, Concur delivers an effortless experience and total transparency into spending wherever and whenever it happens. Concur services adapt to individual employee preferences and scale to meet the needs of companies from small to large, so they can focus on what matters most for their businesses

Ask Approyo: What makes SAP HANA fundamentally different?

​​SAP HANA is different by design. It stores all data in-memory, in columnar format and compressed. Because SAP HANA is so fast, sums, indexes, materialized views and aggregates are not required, and this can reduce the database footprint by 95%. Everything is calculated on-demand, on the fly, in main memory. This makes it possible for companies to run OLTP and analytics applications on the same instance at the same time, and to allow for any type of real-time, ad hoc queries and analyses.

On top of this SAP built solutions to all the problems of columnar databases, like concurrency (HANA uses MVCC) and row-level insert and update performance (HANA uses various mechanisms like a delta store).

Additionally, SAP added a bunch of engines inside SAP HANA to provide virtual OLAP functionality, data virtualization, text analysis, search, geospatial, graph (will be available soon) and web. It supports open standards like REST, JSON, ODBO, MDX, ODBC and JDBC. There is as much functionality in there as a whole Oracle or IBM software stack, in one database.

Experience SAP HANA from Approyo
Approyo can help your company deal with the changing world. Our SAP HANA and Big Data solutions address can help your organization grow today and in the future. Let us show you! Set up a free consultation today. 

Ask Approyo: How can SAP S/4HANA impact small or medium size businesses?

A common myth in the technology and business industry is that SAP is only for large enterprise customers. According to SAP, 80% of SAP customers are small to medium size enterprises (SME), classified as companies with 500 or less employees. In addition, as of January 1, 2016, there are about 2,700 SAP S/4HANA customers and approximately 85% are SME. In fact, SAP S/4HANA is helping companies with as few as 30 employees lead into day’s digital economy.

Drive Instant Value to your Business with Approyo and SAP S/4HANA
SAP S/4HANA is the digital core designed to drive instant insight across all mission critical business processes that also interconnects all aspects of your value chain in real-time: workforce, customers, suppliers, assets and the Internet of Things.

• New Business: Connect to people, devices, and business networks in real-time to deliver new experiences and value to customers. The Internet of Things and Big Data become accessible to your business 
• New Decisions: Gain any insight on any data in real time. Planning, execution, prediction, and simulation can now all be done on the fly and at the highest level of granularity to drive faster business impact 
• New Processes: Focus on the essential tasks in real-time and change business processes as needed to gain new efficiencies 
• New Experience: Enjoy a personalized, responsive, and simple user experience available on any device to get the job done from anywhere across all your lines of business 
• New Technology: Deploy how you want on-premise, cloud, or hybrid for reduced TCO and full flexibility in executing business and IT strategies

Try SAP S/4HANA and Approyo today
Approyo is the leader in SAP S/4HANA deployments. Bring your data and licenses, we’ll set up a POC/sandbox in our environment for you to see how SAP HANA works in the cloud and can help your business. Get started today...

SAP Announces BW/4HANA

SAP unveiled SAP BW/4HANA, a next-generation data warehouse application for running a real-time digital enterprise. This announcement will help in clearing the confusion that has lingered since the beginning with HANA. SAP released SAP S/4HANA, 18 months ago and it became apparent that an update for the data strategy was required. The questions that has lingered since that announcement.... Do you need BW now that you have HANA? Do you switch to HANA from BW?

What is SAP BW/4HANA?
SAP BW/4HANA – an integrated data warehouse solution optimized to fully leverage the SAP HANA in-memory platform. SAP BW/4HANA dramatically simplifies development, administration and user interface of your data warehouse resulting in enhanced business agility.

SAP BW/4HANA customers will benefit from:
An end-to-end data management platform for running a live digital business through the automatic generation of views in SAP HANA that combine SQL data logic and application data taken directly from SAP S/4HANA

• Extreme performance through advanced, in-memory analytics and algorithm pushdown
• Faster application development with a fully redesigned user interface for enhanced data flow modeling
• Reduced data management and storage costs through automatic distribution of multitemperature data
• Efficient data warehouse migration and implementation with unified data load management and full scale-out support, as a de facto standard for customers
• Easy transition for customers with the SAP Business Warehouse application to SAP BW/4HANA through utility features

Why SAP BW/4HANA?
SAP BW/4HANA is unlike any other data warehousing application on the market. SAP BW/4HANA is an integrated data warehousing solution that has been optimized to fully leverage the SAP HANA in-memory database. This optimization empowers business’ to deliver on the demand for simple, open, flexible and highly scalable solutions that will meet the data warehouse needs of the business today and beyond.

• Simplify your data warehouse architecture and free up more time for line-of-business requirements
• Integrate SAP and non-SAP applications and data into one logical data warehouse for a single version of the truth
• Future ready for new business opportunities and growing volumes of data
• Built for on-premise and the cloud 

SAP BW/4HANA Functional Capabilities
SAP BW/4HANA is based on four design principles that enables the next generation of data warehousing. SAP BW/4HANA is designed for the future so it can more easily accommodate business changes opportunities, address changing market demands and adjust into competitive situations.

• Dramatically improves performance for data loading, querying, analysis, staging, and planning processes
• Simplifies data modeling using a modern user interface, Advanced DataStore Object, and Composite Provider
• Accelerates open data warehousing environment thru simplified object models and SQL support
• Offers advanced multi-temperature data store options that allow systems and costs to be managed more easily
• Cuts development time with prebuilt models and Eclipse-based modeling tools
• Consumes and integrates mixed architecture scenarios: SAP BW on SAP HANA and SAP HANA data marts

See the Benefits of Big Data SAP HANA today with Approyo! 
Approyo can help your company deal with the changing world. Our SAP HANA and Big Data solutions address these important questions and more. Let us show you today! Set up a free consultation today. 

SAP to acquire Altiscale

Big news in the SAP Ecosystem! According to Venturebeat, SAP is acquiring Altiscale. 

Why is this important!

• Validates SAP and SAP HANA in the cloud
• Confirms SAP is all-in on Big Data! 

Altiscale provides us the ability to take everything into a cloud, take all the data and bring it into real-time with SAP HANA.

Altiscale is a four-year-old startup that specializes in cloud-based Hadoop and Spark services. Altiscale differentiates itself from these low-cost providers by combining high-performance Hadoop and Spark services with integrated ingestion, transformation, and analytical capabilities.

See the Benefits of Big Data SAP HANA today with Approyo!

Approyo can help your company deal with the changing world. Our SAP HANA and Big Data solutions address these important questions and more. Let us show you today! Set up a free consultation today. 

Ask Approyo: What is GRC?

Approyo recently introduced GRC Ignite. GRC Ignite provides customers with a flexible, innovative solution that can include SAP software license fees as well as SAP maintenance fees, hosting and hardware, and implementation and functional support services. In addition, customers may deploy the GRC applications as an entire suite or as individual elements, based upon needs and budget.

But what is GRC?

GRC (governance, risk management and compliance) software allows companies to integrate and manage IT operations that are subject to regulation. Such software typically combines applications that manage the core functions of GRC into a single integrated package.

GRC software enables an organization to pursue a systematic, organized approach to managing GRC-related strategy and implementation. Instead of keeping data in separate "silos," administrators can use a single framework to monitor and enforce rules and procedures. Successful installations enable organizations to manage risk, reduce costs incurred by multiple installations and minimize complexity for managers.

Why is GRC software important?

GRC software can satisfy the needs of multiple stakeholders, including:

• Business executives that need to identify and manage risk.
• Finance managers assigned to meet regulatory compliance requirements.
• Legal counsels grappling with discovery and records retention.
• IT directors managing software installations related to GRC projects across an organization.

Data retention and risk management procedures mandated by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), HIPAA, Basel II and regional regulations have all placed unprecedented pressure on IT administrators to coordinate enterprise-wide tracking and organization of compliance measures. As a result, the GRC software category has rapidly become a hotly contested space between industry giants like SAP, Oracle, IBM, CA and a host of other companies. Given the complex regulatory burden imposed upon both executives and IT administrators, the tools provided by GRC software will become increasingly important to meeting the new standards.

Learn more about GRC and Approyo

We invite you to join us for a free webinar, Introducing GRC Ignite from Approyo on September 13. During this webinar you learn more about the importance of GRC and how our new solution, GRC Ignite can help your organization.