What's new in SAP HANA Vora & how it helps enterprises

In India many enterprises, especially the ones who have traditionally been SAP customers have moved to HANA in the past few years to utilize their enterprise data for business growth. In the process, most of these enterprises continued to face challenges in terms of getting the real time analysis of their enterprise data. Analytics engines which they used suffered from latency. If SAP is to be believed, it has solved this problem in the latest release called SAP HANA Vora which is an extension to their existing platform.  According to SAP, HANA Vora software is a new in-memory computing innovation for Hadoop and new capabilities planned for SAP HANA Cloud Platform. These new offerings from SAP intend to help companies simplify how their businesses will run in the digital world.

With HANA Vora, SAP wants to leverage the big data and analytics market in India. While launching HANA Vora in Mumbai, SAP claimed that the enterprises are not able to fully utilize their big data implementations because of the inability to get real time data analysis.  Greg McStravick, Global head of Database & Technology, emphasized, "SAP HANA Vora can address the existing issues in any analytics environment. Most of the companies which have deployed big data are not able to analyze and use data in real time since there is considerable latency. Our new software is an extension to HANA platform and addresses the core issues allowing businesses to smartly utilize their data in real time."

Creating Contextual Awareness with SAP HANA Vora

In other words, SAP HANA Vora is an in-memory query engine that boasts to leverage and extend the Apache Spark execution framework to provide enriched interactive analytics on Hadoop. SAP release elaborates and underlines that 'as companies take part in their digital transformation journey, they face complex hurdles in dealing with distributed Big Data everywhere, compounded by the lack of business process awareness across enterprise apps, analytics, Big Data and Internet of Things (IoT) sources.'

SAP HANA Vora, as claimed by the company, helps to extend in-memory computing innovation to distributed data and provides OLAP-like analytics with a business semantic understanding of data in and around the Hadoop ecosystem. Companies can enhance their decision-making with full understanding of their business activities in context with SAP HANA Vora. Data access also can become democratized for data scientists and developers, making it easier to mashup corporate and Hadoop data together to discover answers to unknown questions.

Furthermore, the company executives also claimed that SAP HANA Vora works with all existing business intelligence tools. It further says that it will benefit customers in various industries where highly interactive Big Data analytics in business process context is paramount, such as financial services, telecommunications, healthcare and manufacturing. Use case examples where SAP HANA Vora can potentially benefit customers include:

• Mitigate risk and fraud by detecting new anomalies in financial transactions and customer history data
• Optimize telecommunication bandwidth by analyzing traffic patterns to help avoid network bottlenecks and improve network quality of service (QoS).
• Deliver preventive maintenance and improve product re-call process by analyzing bill-of-material, services records and sensor data together

While SAP claims to bring the contextual awareness to big data with HANA Vora, we have seen enterprises solving this issue internally especially in etail environment where etail players are able to use the data in real time basis for business growth and reach out to customers in a contextual manner. In addition, a host of banking customers have also tried to embark upon the real time analytics. However, there are complexities in every big data Hadoop environment which at the moment seems like a great business opportunity for SAP.

SAP, however, skipped quite a few key questions pertaining to the pricing of the product or whether it would cost a fraction for the existing HANA customers.