SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced it has joined forces with Esri, a leading geographic information system (GIS) and location analytics provider, to more deeply integrate GIS solutions with platforms and enterprise applications from SAP in order to improve business efficiency and decision-making. Esri and SAP are committed to helping SAP customers and the spatial data industry benefit from integration between SAP® solutions and Esri’s leading GIS platform. The announcement was made at the 2013 Esri International User Conference, being held July 8-12 in San Diego.
Through co-innovation between SAP and Esri, an end-to-end support for spatial data is planned across SAP HANA®, the SAP® BusinessObjects™ Business Intelligence (BI) platform and SAP® Mobile Platform, aiming to offer organizations the ability to:
· Enrich SAP® Business Suite applications with geographic content
· Rapidly process spatial, location and enterprise data using SAP HANA in real time
· Visualize geographic information in maps, graphs and charts using tools from the SAP BusinessObjects portfolio
· Deliver applications to field workers that effectively process geospatial and business data using SAP Mobile Platform
“SAP plans to provide real-time high-performance processing of spatial data with SAP HANA, a single platform for transactions, analytics and big data,” said Steve Lucas, executive vice president and general manager, Analytics, Database and Platform, SAP. “By integrating with the Esri ArcGIS platform across SAP HANA, SAP BusinessObjects BI platform and SAP Mobile Platform, and by enriching SAP Business Suite applications with spatial content, we want to enable customers to combine the added dimension of location information with enterprise data, in real time. This will give businesses a new level of immediacy in their decision-making capabilities and will increase their competitive advantage.”
Native High-Performance Processing of Spatial Data Using SAP HANA
SAP plans to expand the SAP HANA platform with the introduction of spatial data processing capabilities that combine location data with enterprise data to enrich and enhance real-time business applications. Furthermore, Esri and SAP intend to optimize connectivity between Esri ArcGIS and SAP HANA via Query Layers, which will allow Esri ArcGIS users to push spatial processing into SAP HANA, unleashing high-performing and real-time capabilities.
SAP plans to enable customers and independent software vendors (ISVs) to consume, process and analyze spatial, transactional and text data within one unified platform for predictive, location-based solutions based on big data. In addition, the company intends to offer SAP HANA customers a native application development platform, including geo-content and location services, to quickly develop and deploy spatially-based solutions. SAP HANA is an open platform allowing BI tools, as well as customer, partner and SAP applications, to leverage the breadth and depth of real-time, spatial processing capabilities.
Integration of Geospatial Content With SAP BusinessObjects BI Solutions
The SAP BusinessObjects BI suite and SAP applications share a common HTML5 visualization platform and software development kit (SDK). The SDK is planned to enable organizations to extend their visualizations with 50 pre-built chart types, geographic maps and advanced visualizations. SAP is enhancing the SDK to include the Esri API for Javascript. SAP aims to help customers leverage existing Esri ArcGIS server and licensed online Esri maps inside BI tools from the SAP BusinessObjects portfolio. SAP Lumira™ software is planned to be the first SAP product to offer the embedded Esri API.
ESRI ArcGIS Integration with SAP Mobile Platform for Location-based Work Management
SAP plans to add new integration using the SDK for SAP Mobile Platform to extend companies’ geospatial data from ESRI ArcGIS systems to mobile field employees. Similar to desktop systems, SAP Mobile Platform is planned to enable application users to manipulate interactive maps and to obtain extremely detailed information on the geographic region in question. By tying into SAP Business Suite, mobile apps like SAP® Work Manager and SAP® CRM Service Manager are intended to effectively combine business process information like work orders, parts inventory levels and historical asset information with geospatial data to give mobile users an extremely rich, multi-system work environment. For instance, SAP plans to enable mobile users to efficiently find jobs and assets nearby, filter for equipment by location and view work orders from a map. Such use cases can serve to completely eliminate paper data entry and the hunt for the right information.
“Esri ArcGIS is the leading platform for organizations implementing a location analytics strategy through the geo-enablement of their enterprise business systems,” said Chris Cappelli, director, Sales, Esri. “By working with SAP to integrate ArcGIS across SAP HANA, analytic solutions and SAP Mobile Platform, intends that customers can easily leverage Esri within their SAP landscape.”
About SAP
As market leader in enterprise application software, SAP (NYSE: SAP) helps companies of all sizes and industries run better. From back office to boardroom, warehouse to storefront, desktop to mobile device – SAP empowers people and organizations to work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively to stay ahead of the competition. SAP applications and services enable more than 238,000 customers to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and grow sustainably. For more information, visit www.sap.com.
