Published on the 28/10/2015 | Written by Donovan Jackson

With the launch of a new software product, SAP sets out to help harness big data…

Among the announcements coming out of its recent Asia Pacific media summit, German software vendor SAP revealed its HANA Vora software, described as an in-memory computing innovation for the open source big data processing framework Hadoop.

In-memory computing processes data in a server’s RAM rather than accessing it from disk drives, greatly accelerating speed.

SAP said HANA Vora is a query engine that extends the Apache Spark execution framework to provide interactive analytics on Hadoop. The software intends to help deal with distributed big data everywhere, a challenge which SAP says is compounded by a lack of business process awareness across enterprise apps, analytics, big data and Internet of Things (IoT) sources.

HANA Vora, said SAP, provides OLAP-like analytics with a business semantic understanding of data in and around the Hadoop ecosystem. Using it, companies can enhance decision-making with full understanding of business activities in context.

The software also promises to ease data access for data scientists and developers, facilitating mashups of corporate and Hadoop data to (perhaps astoundingly) discover answers to unknown questions.

SAP said HANA Vora is intended for customers in various industries where interactive big data analytics in business process context is required, such as financial services, telecommunications, healthcare and manufacturing.

Use case examples include risk mitigation by detecting anomalies in financial transactions and customer history data and, in telecommunications, bandwidth optimisation through traffic pattern analysis.

“Companies across the APJ region are realising the value of the data that they collect on a daily basis,” said Paul Marriott, Database & Analytics SVP APJ. “While this wealth of information is a real opportunity, it presents a challenge in terms of collating the data from many sources, deriving business insight and making it available to the right decision maker. SAP HANA Vora fills that need perfectly by applying the power of in-memory computing to distributed data.”

SAP HANA Vora is planned to be released to customers in late September; a cloud-based developer edition is planned to be available at the same time.