SAP SE has rolled out an updated version of its flagship HANA in-memory database and application platform this week, with the emphasis on Big Data analytics and the Internet of Things (IoT).

Released yesterday, SAP said HANA service pack 10 brings more functionality to the edge of the network, an area that’s increasingly seeing more analytic workloads and business transactions take place. The new capabilities also serve to bolster data center “readiness”, the company claims, as an increasing amount of data needs to be synchronized with remote systems.

One of the new capabilities sees HANA better connect with IoT applications at scale, while the platform also gets better at Big Data management. According to Steve Lucas, SAP’s president of platform solutions, service pack 10 is one of the biggest-ever updates to the platform since it was launched in 2010.

SAP is touting a new remote data-synchronization feature in HANA that allows organizations to synchronize data between remote locations at the edge of the network and the enterprise, the company said. For example, it’s now possible for developers to build Big Data and IoT-centric mobile apps that take advantage of the new feature via SAP’s SQL Anywhere embeddable database technology. This allows organizations to capture, access and feed data back into SAP HANA from remote locations and dispersed workplaces, be they restaurants, vending machines, pumping stations or mines, the company said.

Streamlining the data center

There’s also a new Web-based development workbench that’s designed to help enterprises cleanse data and manage duplicates, while data center readiness and support for always-on, mission-critical apps are given a boost with new high-availability and disaster-recovery features.

“We think that Hana can help companies refactor and dramatically reduce the size of their data centers,” Lucas told PC World. “Instead of one massive bank of databases to store transactional data, another bank for time series—the lag data—and then another for forecasting and predictive modeling, Hana can have one copy of the data and perform all those functions.”

The new version of HANA also comes with expanded data-integration capabilities that include support for the latest Cloudera Inc., Hortonworks Inc. and MapR Technologies Inc. Hadoop distributions. Meanwhile, HANA now boasts faster data transfer speeds with Spark SQL and rules-based data movement in multiple storage tiers.

Digging deeper into data

SAP is also extending its reach into data analytics, not only with HANA but also with its Predictive Analytics software. SAP Predictive Analytics 2.2 is now better at accomodating wide data sets and using these to carry out predictive modeling. That’s because SAP has expanded its automated predictive library with dozens of new algorithms, while improved R integration and model-comparison capabilities provide more user-focused enhancements.

Topping things off, SAP’s Cloud for Planning software gets a new mobile application, which means users can be notified of new events and communicate with colleagues from anywhere.

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