SAP gets Hadoop’d, twice

It is, perhaps, a measure of the changes going on in and around the development of cloud services that major business software vendors with long track records of dominating sectors of the business management activity start integrating other products in order to provide customers with a better, richer service.

The latest to do take this step is SAP, which sees the company sign up reseller agreements with both Intel and Hortonworks. The former deal will involve SAP in reselling Intel’s Distribution of the widely used Apache Hadoop big data distributed processing tools. As an alternative, SAP will also be reselling the Hortonworks Data Platform, an open source Hadoop distribution.

These will now be available as alternative big data analytics tools to SAP’s own offering in that marketplace, HANA. This is quite a significant expansion of the existing partnerships the company has with both vendors.

As an additional marker of a shift in SAP from a focus on selling its products to one of solving customer business problems, the company has also created a new Data Science organisation. This has the goal of helping customers uncover relevant information within their data. As an inducement, the company last week  unveiled its `Big Data Geek Challenge’, which has a $10,000 prize fund. Details of how to enter can be found here.

The integration of the HANA platform and its Hadoop is aimed at pulling together real-time business insights with managing extremely large data storage. The goal is to overcome the fragmented landscape of current data management and business intelligence solutions that can be difficult to connect together. By expanding its big data strategy, the company aims to provide customers with a single, integrated approach to combining enterprise data.  

As well as integrating with HANA, the Hadoop offerings will also work with SAP’s other applications in and around big data, such as Sybase IQ software, its Data Services software and the BusinessObjects business intelligence (BI) solutions. Taken together, SAP sees this as now giving it the tools to offer business analysis across a continuum of data, ranging from massive amounts of cold data, through petabyte-level storage of warm data, and on to real-time and streaming data analysis.

“Enterprises today are looking for big data solutions that are simple and quick to implement that enable insight from all data in real time in a secure environment to improve business processes,” said Boyd David, vice president and general manager of Intel’s Datacenter Software Division. “With performance optimisations for Intel hardware as well as encryption and decryption improvements for better security, the integration of the Intel Distribution for Apache Hadoop with the SAP HANA platform provides enterprises with security and scalability without having to sacrifice performance.”

On the other side of the fence, the deal with Hortonworks gives the growing army of businesses using open source applications the chance to work with SAP HANA.

“By reselling the Hortonworks Data Platform, SAP can assure their customers they are deploying an SAP HANA and Hadoop architecture fully supported by SAP, while giving them the benefits of a fully open source Hadoop distribution,” said Shaun Connolly, vice president, Corporate Strategy, Hortonworks. “Hortonworks is committed to contributing all of its innovations back to the Apache project, ensuring that 100 percent of their Hadoop distribution is open source.”