SAP unveiled a new product that promises to help businesses make sense of a deluge of real-world data from retail transactions, transport systems and social media, hoping to persuade customers to switch from rival database suppliers.
SAP HANA Vora, as the database query software will be known, aims to give businesses greater insights into the vast volumes of data organisations are collecting from customer feedback, along with sensors installed in products, vehicles and networks.
But Europe’s biggest software company has to convince its customer base, which includes the world’s biggest multinational companies, to adopt its new SAP HANA software and must show its database is ready to handle the most demanding tasks before these customers will consider replacing existing systems.
HANA Vora will work along with Apache Hadoop, an open source framework popular with serious software developers for handling huge sets of data, from government statistics to scientific results to shopping or credit data.
“The new datasets that are emerging are going to have a profound impact on how a business is going to function, and what its options are,” said SAP Chief Technology Officer Quentin Clark, who until last year was in charge of rival Microsoft Corp’s data product business.
SAP primarily derives its revenue from business planning applications that have always run atop databases supplied by rivals such as Oracle, IBM and Microsoft.
