SAP unveils SAP Hana 2 in-memory database platform

European Space Agency and Munich Re brandished as launch customers for cloud-based database service

SAP has unveiled its SAP Hana 2 platform, the company's in-memory database technology, combined with microservices and made available in the cloud via SAP Hybris-as-a-service.

The company announced the SAP Hana 2 platform today at its SAP TechEd Barcelona event.

Current customers and users of SAP Hana include bakery chain Greggs, UK-based blind and shutter manufacturer Hillarys, and Transport for London.

The platform will be released to customers at the end of the month, while an Express edition will be released to customers shortly afterwards to enable them to jump-start new development projects quickly and at low cost.

SAP is promising to update the software twice a year.

New features of SAP Hana 2 include:

• Database management. These include improvements to workload management and administration. For example, the new active/active read-enabled option will enable IT organisations to leverage secondary systems (previously used only for system replication) to offload read-intensive workloads for improved operations;
• Data management, encompassing enhancements to enterprise modelling, data integration, data quality and tiered storage;
• Analytics. SAP claims that SAP Hana 2 will offer enhanced analytical processing engines for text, spatial, graph and streaming data;
• Improved application development tools with enhanced functions for application servers, the development tools themselves and various languages. 'Bring-your-own-language' support provides a choice of additional third-party build packs and runtimes that can be used within SAP Hana extended application services, advanced model. In addition, a new file-processor API will enable developers to extract text and metadata from documents in a bid to deliver deeper insights.

The new SAP Hana services-in-the-cloud will incorporate a number of analytic enhancements, including Text Analysis Entity Extraction, Text Analysis Fact Extraction, and Text Analysis Linguistic Analysis.

"SAP pioneered in-memory computing with the launch of SAP HANA in 2010 and throughout our journey we have driven breakthrough innovation on a highly stable core data platform for our customers," claimed Bernd Leukert, member of the executive board, products and innovation, SAP SE.

SAP also brandished the European Space Agency as a launch customer, showing off its Earth Observation Analysis cloud service, which it claims is already being used by re-insurer Munich Re to better price insurance risk for natural disasters.

The service combines SAP Hana with the ESA's Earth observation data to provide geospatial analysis of natural disasters such as earthquakes, wildfires and flooding.

"Every year, wildfires affect nature, people, their homes and businesses," said Andreas Siebert, head of geospatial solutions at Munich Re.

He added: "While the progress of a fire itself is hard to predict, this new service from SAP, leveraging satellite data from ESA, allows us to accurately calculate costs and risks related to wildfires and even gain insights into the future probability of wildfires. This will help us to keep costs down for our clients."

The Earth Observation Analysis service provides a standardised interface for quick, easy consumption of detailed analytics, and clusters them according to customer needs, claims SAP.

Government agencies and companies active in all industries, from insurance and reinsurance to mill products, mining, utilities, and retail, can use the API delivered through the service and, based on continuous access to historical and real-time satellite data from around the world, they can make improved business decisions concerning elementary industry-specific questions.

Questions may include where to place new power lines, where to build a new store or when to harvest crops.