3 Major Business Benefits of SAP HANA

SAP HANA provides a single in-memory data platform that supports both transactions and analytics on diverse data, a key requirement for applications supporting a modern, real-time digital business. In today’s digital economy, businesses cannot take action on stale insights, thus a true in-memory data platform should support real-time processing for transactions and analytics for all of a company’s data. This is a key differentiator of the SAP HANA platform against other traditional database vendors. Here are the top three benefits of deploying SAP HANA according to SAP.

In-Memory First
SAP achieved a true transaction and analytical (i.e. translytical) platform by designing SAP HANA from the ground up with a new data processing architecture in mind.  This architecture greatly simplifies applications built on this platform removing many of the legacy overhead required to optimize applications on traditional disk-based database solutions.

SAP HANA is the only true in-memory columnar data store optimized for both high-speed transactional scenarios and also very fast query performance optimally supporting both OLTP and OLAP application scenarios. With SAP HANA, there is a single copy of data as there is no need to move data to external systems to offload analytic workloads or populate materialized views and in-memory caches to achieve acceptable performance.  This allows applications built on SAP HANA to process transactional and analytical workloads at high speed without any data duplication enabling businesses to have accurate insights based on the latest data.

Other solutions in the market typically provide an in-memory “option” to existing disk-based, row-oriented solutions, requiring a copy of data to be made into in-memory storage.  Row-based storages don’t yield the same level of data compression as columnar storages leading to higher costs and inefficiencies. These solutions may provide some performance improvements in certain use-cases, but they do not deliver the overall value that SAP HANA does by truly reducing the data footprint, increasing overall performance for all data and reducing management costs of the solution.

Managing Data of All Sizes
Does it always make sense to have all data in-memory?  Realistically, this is not necessary. SAP HANA provides an innovative way to manage hot and warm data storage in an optimal way to strike the right balance between price and performance.

SAP HANA Dynamic Data Tiering provides multistore table partitions which easily allow a single table to span across memory and disk.  This greatly simplifies access to hot and warm data in consuming applications and greatly reduces the administrative effort to manage large data volumes. This provides for much lower total cost of ownership by reducing the amount of hardware needed, lower administration costs, and more efficient IT operations overall.

Foundation for a Modern Data Platform and the Intelligent Enterprise
SAP HANA is a modern multi-tenant in-memory platform to build next-generation Big Data, IoT, translytical, and advanced analytics applications. SAP HANA allows advanced analytics using a single data platform.  How is this done?

SAP HANA natively provides capabilities for machine learning, spatial processing, graph, streaming analytics, time series, text analytics/search, and cognitive services all within the same platform.  Applications on SAP HANA can provide real-time actionable insights from a wide-variety of data types.

Combining these innovative technologies with SAP HANA’s advanced application development, modeling and custom algorithm support inside the database layer, more business logic can be executed close to the data.   Specifically, SAP HANA’s support technology like stored procedures, business functions, core data services, rules framework, calculation views, and the application function library provide developers with a way to easily model complex data-intensive operations as close to the data as possible.  Most competitive solutions require that you copy the data between core data storage and other technology stacks to perform these advanced analytics on the data.

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Approyo Named Among ‘Silicon 70’ by The Silicon Review Magazine

Approyo is proud to announce that it has been named to the Silicon 70 by The Silicon Review.

Silicon Review highlights Approyo’s competitive edge, attributing it to their method of offering cutting edge SAP HANA and S/4HANA solutions that can be migrated in easy and quick manner.

“The Silicon 70 edition identifies companies which are revolutionizing the technology and business marketplace, and winning a spot on this list indicates the company has distinguished itself being highly adaptive, innovative, customer centered, and having the ability to grow,” said Sreshtha Banerjee, Editor-in-Chief of The Silicon Review Magazine. The publication has selected Approyo based on its business strategies, service/product innovation, financial soundness, ability to attract key demographics, and the ability to conduct global business.

“We are proud to be part of this great list of companies" said Christopher Carter, CEO of Approyo. "This achievement continues to validate our success in the SAP and Cloud marketplace.”

The magazine spotlights companies that provide leading, effective and groundbreaking technologies. For the full article, please visit Silicon Review.

Approyo Honored 3 Years in a Row as an Inc. 5000 Company, Ranking No. 895

Inc. magazine today ranked Approyo NO. 895 on its 37th annual Inc. 5000, the most prestigious ranking of the nation's fastest-growing private companies. It’s Approyo’s third straight year on the list, driven by several years of strong revenue growth. Only 20% of all companies on the list have been honored 3 or more times.

The list represents a unique look at the most successful companies within the American economy's most dynamic segment—its independent small businesses. Microsoft, Dell, Domino's Pizza, Pandora, Timberland, LinkedIn, Yelp, Zillow, and many other well-known names gained their first national exposure as honorees on the Inc. 5000.

“It is such a great honor to continue experiencing the kind of growth necessary to be on the Inc. 5000 list for three years in a row,” said Christopher Carter, CEO of Approyo. “Thank you to all our staff and great partners and customers. 2018 continues to be a fantastic year as we grow our staff and footprint in the SAP ecosystem. We look forward to this kind of sustained growth and prosperity for years to come as we continue our commitment to excellence.”

Not only have the companies on the 2018 Inc. 5000 (which are listed online at Inc.com, with the top 500 companies featured in the September issue of Inc., available on newsstands August 15) been very competitive within their markets, but the list as a whole shows staggering growth compared with prior lists. The 2018 Inc. 5000 achieved an astounding three-year average growth of 538.2 percent, and a median rate of 171.8 percent. The Inc. 5000's aggregate revenue was $206.1 billion in 2017, accounting for 664,095 jobs over the past three years.

Complete results of the Inc. 5000, including company profiles and an interactive database that can be sorted by industry, region, and other criteria, can be found at http://www.inc.com/inc5000.

"If your company is on the Inc. 5000, it's unparalleled recognition of your years of hard work and sacrifice," says Inc. editor in chief James Ledbetter. "The lines of business may come and go or come and stay. What doesn't change is the way entrepreneurs create and accelerate the forces that shape our lives."

View Approyo on the Inc 5000 list: https://www.inc.com/profile/approyo

Read the full announcement on www.approyo.com

How the BOHH Labs and Approyo Partnership Can Accelerate Transitioning to SAP HANA in the Cloud

The enterprise technology landscape is rapidly changing, and more companies are embracing digital transformation and integrating cloud services to enhance business agility, efficiency and extract analytics. In fact, technology leader in business applications, SAP, has pegged a deadline of 2025 for when it will terminate support for its ECC6 on-premise solution.

For businesses looking to migrate to more advanced SAP HANA systems in the Cloud, this may seem like a long way off, but the deadline shouldn’t be the only driving force behind your migration strategy. Cloud-based SAP HANA solutions offer businesses a vast array of benefits, as they look to harness the potential of digitization and business transformation.

However, digital transformation is an evolving market and there is not a one-size-fits-all solution. For businesses to be successful in their transformation to Cloud-based SAP HANA solutions, there must be collaboration, and Approyo and BOHH Labs have teamed up to offer SAP customers seamless migration to SAP HANA Cloud environments. Approyo CEO, Chris Carter and BOHH CEO, Simon Bain illustrate below how strategic partnerships can create a best in breed solution that bring success for the end customer.

According to Chris:

"As part of the push to move to the cloud, SAP has developed SAP S/4HANA, which is built on the advanced in-memory platform, SAP HANA, and is an entirely new generation of SAP Business Suite. It fundamentally redefines how enterprise software creates value across industries with instant insight. SAP S/4HANA also personalizes the user experience on any device and natively connects to Big Data, the Internet of Things, and business and social networks - all in real time.

Like all new things, especially in technology, the updates can be daunting. Approyo can help businesses move SAP applications, such as SAP S/4HANA, to the cloud with tailored implementation roadmaps to ensure every organization undergoes a seamless migration. We are one of the only SAP partners in the world that can migrate SAP applications to the cloud, provide ongoing support and provide long term managed services for hosted cloud environments."

Simon Shares:
​​
"While Approyo specializes in making SAP migrations smooth from an implementation standpoint, we combine with their capabilities to make the migration smooth by enabling better security and access to data stored with SAP HANA. We bring security to the data and the business suite, so customers can get simple access to their complex data. We provide total security on all stored data by uniquely providing database or specific file security, enabling prioritization and control of sensitive data. BOHH’s security service provides full text search capabilities, even on secured data, and supports Bot technology for data to be conveniently accessed and bring enhanced access flow to data within the system."

Chris adds:

"Often companies are hesitant to migrate completely to cloud deployments due to security, performance disruption and accessibility. This includes migrating to the new SAP S/4HANA platform. The BOHH/Approyo partnership is reducing these setbacks."

Simon also adds:

"By partnering together, Approyo and BOHH Labs can address customer demands and focus on what our enterprise, integrator and reseller customers need to secure access to their business-critical applications and data in the cloud with minimal disruption. The joint solution between Approyo and BOHH Labs is addressing the challenges enterprises face migrating to the cloud and enables SAP customers to leverage the analytics capabilities of SAP HANA, while gaining a secure method to easily access all enterprise systems to quickly find, search and unlock the value of all their data."

Read the full blog post: www.approyo.com

Migrating your company to the intelligent enterprise

We are entering the era of intelligent mega ­processes, which start by combining the right data sets and converting them into intelligent insights. These insights then trigger automated transactions across the process. Leading companies that are making digital transformation a reality are putting data and intelligence at the center of their future. They are building new capabilities, skills, and technology, and evolving their culture to transform into an 'Intelligent Enterprise' and achieve the aforementioned outcomes. These companies are not only delivering short-term value to shareholders, but are also positioned to thrive and transform their industry.

No company has the appetite to replace their systems, as every company has a very different landscape and a different level of focus based on their business priorities. Everyone has to also see the value. Moving to the Intelligent Enterprise is not just a technical upgrade. The real value comes when companies adopt a customer-first, purpose-driven mindset, leverage innovative approaches such as design thinking and agile methodologies to reimagine business processes and business models.

From SAP and Approyo's experience, there are the top three paths to migrating your company architecture to the intelligent enterprise. These paths have one thing in common - a lean enterprise architecture that is low cost and is data driven and ultimately provides you with the architectural agility in the new economy. The path that is right for you should be based on value and strategic alignment. There is no one way to get there, but early adopters are finding success based on the scenarios below:

REIMAGINE BUSINESS PROCESS: 
Many companies are focused on end-to-end business process transformation (such as supply chain, procurement), landscape simplification, and reduction in customization. The goal is to migrate core ERP processes to S/4HANA +Cloud/ LoB with full transformation in mind. These companies are looking to change the front office, supply chain, and more to truly address customer experience. They are looking to drive the next-generation of processes across the value chain. This requires a fresh greenfield approach, and a detailed review of which standard best practices in S/4HANA meet your business requirements. These companies are ready to move their ERP into private / public cloud environments. While a major effort across business processes, it is paying off with a TCO reduction of 20 - 30% and tremendous business value as next practices are adopted.

REIMAGINE BUSINESS MODEL: 
There are also companies that are looking at business model innovation or M&A and are taking advantage of the ability to have many industry solutions in one box. With industry lines blurring, the ability to take business capabilities from one industry and leverage them for a new business model in another industry is tremendous (for example, bringing retail to telco). This requires a fresh greenfield approach.

START WITH MIGRATING LOBS TO BEST-IN-CLASS CLOUD SOLUTIONS:
While some companies are planning and executing the move to S/4HANA they start in parallel to innovate on the edge. These companies are taking 1 LoB at a time - HR, Procurement, Supply Chain, Manufacturing and are focusing on driving value short-term with ECC + LoB cloud portfolio. Once moved to S/4HANA these companies will fully benefit from the latest innovative solutions end-to-end.

Read the full blog post on www.approyo.com 

Approyo CEO Chris Carter featured on Game-Changing Predictive Machine Learning, Presented by SAP

Approyo CEO Chris Carter was recently featured as a guest on Game-Changing Predictive Machine Learning, Presented by SAP. During this episode, Chris talks about Big Data, Machine Learning, AI and more...

About the episode: 
Big data has officially crashed into the business world, taking competition to new levels.

Can your business benefit from big data without investing in qualified data-science resources – an entire lab and pedigreed experts – to navigate and take advantage of this new business domain, which includes AI and Machine Learning?

Good news!
Packaged application software has lowered the skills barrier to mining the data. Our panel is proof that anyone can successfully use data analytics tools. Hear what they wish they’d known when they began.

Listen on-demand: https://www.voiceamerica.com/episode/108752/business-analyst-by-day-data-science-hero-by-night

Featured Guests

Christopher Carter
With almost three decades of extraordinary working experience in the SAP industry, Christopher Carter, CEO at Approyo, founded Approyo with the goal of making it easy for customers to embrace SAP HANA. Chris works with businesses around the globe and is known to assist them in their journey to the usage of Big Data in the forms of Hadoop (Cloudera and Hortonwork’s) and SAP HANA. His experience has earned him a national recognition by the American SAP Users Group, SAP, Hadoop World, Cloud Expo and more. Additionally, Mr. Carter was fortunate to create the first SAP cloud ever used by an SAP client in 2005, and the first Client SAP HANA Production cloud.

Jason Olson
Jason Olson is an Analytics Specialist at Kimberly-Clark Corporation. He has spent the last 15 years working in every area of the Business Intelligence field accumulating end-to-end technical and functional expertise. He earned his BBA from the University of Wisconsin - Whitewater in 2003 and MBA from University of Wisconsin – Oshkosh in 2011. Leveraging his business acumen and technical expertise, Jason bridges the gap between technology and the real business needs in a wide range of business functions. His real passion is having a seat at the table with business users to accomplish their goals, demonstrate the art of possible, and enabling those who know their business best to leverage advanced tools and techniques. Jason’s current focus is on Machine Learning and enabling a diverse user base to leverage.

Samantha Wong
Samantha Wong is a Product Manager for Predictive Analytics at SAP. She has been part of the SAP Analytics team for over 4 years, and in her previous role, she supported customers across the Asia Pacific Japan region to drive actionable insights out of their data. With a Bachelor of Commerce degree specialized in Marketing, and experience in Advertising, Banking, and Insurance, Samantha fits the profile of analyst turned citizen data scientist. Connect with her on LinkedIn for interesting articles and commentary on the ever evolving world of Predictive Analytics and Machine Learning.

Start your path to the Intelligent Enterprise with Approyo
Approyo provides full SAP service technology with extensive capabilities in consulting, solutions architecture, hosting and managed services, in order to develop the right solution for our customers. Get started today... 

Where Machine Learning Can Make a Difference for your Business

Machine learning uses sophisticated algorithms to “learn” from massive volumes of Big Data. The more data the algorithms can access, the more they can learn. Real-world machine learning examples are everywhere. Think of personalized product recommendations on Amazon, facial recognition on Facebook, or fastest route suggestions in Google Maps.

Major Benefits of Machine Learning impacting companies today

• Faster decisions - Machine learning algorithms can prioritize and automate decision making. They can also flag opportunities and smart actions that should be taken immediately – so you can achieve the best results.
• Adaptability - Artificial intelligence doesn’t just look at historical data. It can process real-time inputs – so you can adjust on the fly. Think of cars that can automatically stop before rear-ending another vehicle.
• Algorithmic business - An “algorithmic business” uses advanced machine learning algorithms to achieve a high level of automation. Making the shift can pave the way for innovative new business models, products, and services.
• Deeper insights - Machine learning can analyze big, complex, and streaming data, and find insights – including predictive insights – that are beyond human capabilities. It can then trigger actions based on those insights.
• Efficiency - With smart, machine learning-supported business processes, you can dramatically improve efficiency. Plan and forecast accurately, automate tasks, reduce costs, and even eliminate human error.
• Better outcomes - From triggering smart actions based on new opportunities and risks, to accurately predicting the results of a decision before it is made – machine learning can help you drive better business outcomes.

Deploy intelligent applications with embedded state-of-the-art technologies that amplify human qualities.

FINANCE – streamline and improve accuracy of time-intensive, repetitive activities such as assigning incoming payments to open invoices

HUMAN RESORCES (HR) – create efficient hiring processes, enable job matching, and foster an active personalized culture of learning

CUSTOMER SERVICE – gain new insights into customer behavior and improve the customer experience through personalization while eliminating manual processes

MARKETING – address more customers efficiently and personally with the same resources in the same time, and boost revenue, margins, and marketing ROI

PROCUREMENT – use machine learning to enrich your catalog

Machine Learning and SAP Leonardo

Traditionally, organizations have been able to analyze only structured data that resides in databases or business systems, such as enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management software. Because most enterprise data – including images, videos, audio, e-mails, documents, and natural language text – is unstructured, it can be difficult to mine meaningful insights from the vast majority of your data. Fortunately, recent advances in machine learning technologies are making it easier to tap these unstructured data resources.

SAP Leonardo provides advanced machine learning technology that helps applications recognize patterns and correlations in data. The foundation offers instantly consumable services that help you learn from data, extract knowledge, and gain new insights. Without massive computing power or the efforts of data scientists, the foundation helps you add intelligence to your enterprise applications.

Read the full blog post on www.approyo.com