News Analysis - SAP moves Ariba Spend Visibility to HANA - Interesting first step of long journey

Let’s dissect the press release and comment along the lines:

WALLDORF, Germany — April 29, 2014 — Continuing its commitment to seamless innovation, SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced that Ariba, an SAP company, is moving to SAP® HANA, the leading in-memory platform for real-time computing. The initial step, involving the transition of Ariba® Spend Visibility™, was completed with zero down time, demonstrating the ease and simplicity available through SAP HANA.

MyPOV – Good move by SAP delivering on its statement of moving its products to the HANA database and platform. It is starting with probably one of the easier and more appealing pieces of Ariba functionality- the Spend Visibility tool. Spend Visibility is a planning process in purchasing where the buyers analyse the quality of their suppliers and decide, if changes on the supplier side are necessary – mostly for business risk and viability reasons. For that SAP enriches supplier data with Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) data. So it is a nice DaaS (Data as a Service) appliance, enriched with 3rd party data. One can wonder if that analysis has to run in memory – it certainly runs faster, starting with the load of purchase data. From a pure code perspective this should be a low hanging fruit use case – but you can’t blame anyone, even SAP, to start with the easier tasks when migrating to a new platform. The DaaS and 3rd party aspect certainly caters well for the analytical ambitions SAP has with HANA.

The company is now shifting the Ariba® Network to the platform, which will enable participants in the business-to-business trading community to gain new insights into their operations and act on them more quickly than ever to drive unprecedented business outcomes and competitive advantage.

MyPOV - Credit to asap to share the next step. Moving the Ariba Network over to HANA is more challenging, as the supplier network is a living structure with constant changes. At the point of blogging we do not know if SAP went for an expansive re-write of the functionality – making e.g. each supplier atomic across multiple customers – or not (yet). It will be also interesting to learn, if SAP used the opportunity to use its new graph search capability.

The Ariba Network on SAP HANA will create an entirely new cloud offering possible only from SAP. Companies will be able to glean predictive intelligence on risks, performance, capabilities, rates and more from the more than 15 years of transaction and relationship data and community-generated content that reside in the world’s largest, most global business network. Leveraging the speed and power of SAP HANA, they can instantly process this information and enable innovative processes that dramatically improve their performance and productivity. […]

MyPOV – So this paragraph points in the direction of a re-write – but we will wait for details till calling what the new offering will be. The analytical capabilities on top of the network data are intriguing and a great showcase for HANA’s (new) analytical capabilities.

Smoothing the Transition
Customers across industries are already experiencing the benefits. SAP transitioned Ariba Spend Visibility to SAP HANA without disruption, upgrading thousands of companies and more than 4.7 million individual users instantly. These users are now processing key operational and analytical reports up to 100 times faster.

MyPOV – We will always give credit to vendors who announce after the fact – and this paragraph sounds like that SAP has moved the spend data for the Spend Visibility analysis already. It will be interesting to learn how often and with which processes SAP refreshes the data in HANA from the Ariba OLTP system.

Seeing the Future
As SAP moves the Ariba Network to SAP HANA, companies will be able to analyse the vast volumes of information they have on their businesses faster than ever before. This includes structured data on production, marketing, sales and pricing, HR, finance, facilities and operations, as well as transaction-level data from supplier, customer and partner relationships, and unstructured data such as blogs and Tweets.

MyPOV – Interesting new functionality – but we are talking about future development that needs to happen.

With SAP HANA, data loads 30 times faster and is instantly accessible. So once a sourcing project, contract or invoice is initiated on the network, companies can immediately perform more complex analyses based on an expanded set of variables, including cost centers, purchase price variances and micro regions, and receive results in real time.

MyPOV – No surprises that HANA can load data faster than other – non in memory databases. If the described reports justify the cost of moving (and holding) sourcing project and related data in memory – remains to be seen.

Leveraging SAP® Lumira™, the company’s visualization software, they will be able to see and interact with their data in entirely new ways and outline more informed strategies that advance their business goals. Suppliers, for instance, will for the first time be able to access their complete transaction history with a given customer and create intuitive data visualizations that allow them to understand how their payment cycles are trending or whether their invoice rejection rates are improving. […]

MyPOV – No surprise again – SAP has again and again positioned (see BI 2014 here) Lumira as the go to platform – at least for the HANA Cloud Platform where we assume these offerings are being built on.

The new capabilities, which can be added on an “opt-in” basis, will provide buyers and sellers with complete flexibility and choice to meet the demands of their business and accelerate the results that they deliver. SAP will preview these capabilities and show the power of the Ariba Network on SAP HANA at SAPPHIRE® NOW, being held June 3-5, 2014, in Orlando, Florida

MyPOV – We will need to understand what the ‘opt-in’ basis means in detail, especially if and what costs are involved in that.

Overall MyPOV

It is good to see SAP making good on its commitment to bring all products to the HANA platform. As mentioned before – that SAP starts with relatively easier use cases and with scenarios that make HANA more attractive is a legitimate choice. We hope for some clarity on potential license cost – if any. And there can be no doubt SAP is enabling new and interesting functionality for Ariba customers. If the benefit of that new functionality justifies SAP’s investment will have to be seen. And more challenging scenarios – like the transactional Ariba and SuccessFactors portfolio look – will be the true test of HANA as an all purpose database. We know you can load and analyse data very fast in memory, complemented by good analytics and likely the graph search (in the future for the Supplier Network). So a good start with an attractive scenario for SAP – but the road to get rid of other database running under the hood of SAP applications is still long.

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