Saeed Al Khotani Saudi Gazette RIYADH — SAP or System Application Saudi Arabia, has presented an exclusive demonstration at the Al-Faisaliyah Hotel here to explain the benefits and influence of “business suite” applications on high performance analysis appliance (HANA) platform. The demonstration, made for industry experts, customers and the media, was part of the bid by SAP to gain traction in Saudi Arabia's database market. Business Suite on HANA makes SAP the only company in the world to successfully combine transactional applications with analytics in-memory, which dramatically simplifies the IT landscape and empowers businesses to grow with unprecedented speed and predictive analysis. Business Suite on HANA is the latest trend in an in-memory technology accelerant that was launched in 2010, company officials said. Rapidly gaining in popularity across MENA (Middle East and North Africa), the technology has already enabled many customers worldwide to speed up business processes by over 100,000 times. “We now live in a hyper-connected world where real-time reactions are increasingly vital to business success,” said Ranjit Rajan, Research Director – Software and Services, IDC MEA. “Traditional planning is becoming a thing of the past, and the unabated growth in enterprise data – both structured and unstructured – is driving discussions around the ‘value' that can be extracted from that data in order to drive competitive advantage. Big data technologies such as in-memory databases make rapid transactional and analytical processing of that data possible, thus accelerating business processes,” he added. “SAP has been at the forefront of leveraging in-memory technologies and, with the launch of Business Suite on HANA, it will be fascinating to see how its clients and competitors react in the near future.” Business Suite on HANA accelerates core processes end-to-end in human resources, finance, marketing, sales, maintenance, service, manufacturing, procurement and supply chain to make business truly data-driven and faster than ever before. It also enables a user-driven experience that offers a unified view of real-time information at any level of granularity, as well as a platform for real-time interaction and data access of every type, on any device. Importantly, Business Suite on HANA is configured for continuous incremental change, and operates on a flexible, open architecture that gives customers choice of hardware, database, implementation partners, and solution providers. Ahmed Al-Faifi, Managing Director, SAP Saudi Arabia, said: “Business Suite on HANA is a massive calling card for SAP in Saudi Arabia. This is a country where business is starting to move at incredible speed and data is growing at a relentless rate. To do nothing is to lose out. SAP is committed to partner with Saudi businesses to enhance their ability to react in real time, to dive into oceans of big data and emerge with true insight, and to benefit from new technologies like cloud, mobility, and in-memory computing.” “This is not about keeping pace with the competition, it is about outpacing them. We made this presentation to our clients and potential customers here, because we see that Saudi Arabia today caught a vivid glimpse of what industry analysts are calling a game-changing real-time business platform,” Al-Faifi added. “It is not about having information, it is about having the right information to act at the right time. By accelerating core processes like never before, SAP Business Suite on HANA creates smarter business innovations, faster business processes and simpler business interactions to unlock a new era of opportunity.” Ziad Murtaja, Managing Director, HP Saudi Arabia, said: “Businesses today need to react at market speed, they need employees that are empowered to make the right decisions, and they need to be consistently unlocking new opportunities for both innovation and profit. Business Suite on HANA has the potential to deliver on all of these fronts in Saudi Arabia, and it is exactly the type of technology HP is proud to be associated with.” Alaa Dabbagh, Regional Manager for Central Saudi Arabia, Fujitsu Technology Solutions, said: “Business Suite on HANA is a turning-point for the industry and one that can be delivered without disruption. Hundreds of customers around the world and in the region already count on Fujitsu's SAP solutions, and we are now bringing to Saudi the best in class infrastructure for SAP HANA, which we have already deployed successfully in various countries around the Middle East.''
