SAP HANA to Make Business Network Smarter and Faster

Buyers and sellers can gain new insights and the ability to act immediately now through the Ariba Network

Walldorf, GermanyMay 2, 2014—Continuing its commitment to seamless innovation, SAP AG announced that Ariba, an SAP company, is moving to SAP HANA, an in-memory platform for real-time computing. The initial step, involving the transition of Ariba Spend Visibility, was completed with zero downtime, demonstrating the ease and simplicity available through SAP HANA. The company is now shifting the Ariba Network to the platform, which can enable participants in the business-to-business trading community to gain new insights into their operations and act on them more quickly to drive better business outcomes and competitive advantage.

The Ariba Network on SAP HANA creates a new cloud offering possible only from SAP. Companies are going to be able to glean predictive intelligence on risks, performance, capabilities, rates and more from the more than 15 years of transaction and relationship data, and community-generated content that reside in the large, global business network. Leveraging the speed and power of SAP HANA, they can instantly process this information and enable innovative processes that improve performance and productivity.

According to Bill McDermott, co-CEO and member of the executive board of SAP AG, “The Ariba Network is already changing the way businesses work together with more than 1.5 million companies transacting half a trillion USD in commerce. With Ariba solutions on SAP HANA, companies can gain real-time insights and transparency into their business networks.”

Smoothing the Transition

Customers across industries are already experiencing the benefits. SAP transitioned Ariba Spend Visibility to SAP HANA without disruption, upgrading thousands of companies and more than 4.7 million individual users instantly. These users are now processing key operational and analytical reports up to 100 times faster.

Seeing the Future

As SAP moves the Ariba Network to SAP HANA, companies are going to be able to analyze the volumes of information they have on their businesses faster than ever before. This includes structured data on production, marketing, sales and pricing, human resources, finance, facilities and operations, as well as transaction-level data from supplier, customer and partner relationships, and unstructured data, such as blogs and Tweets.

With SAP HANA, data loads 30 times faster and is instantly accessible. So once a sourcing project, contract or invoice is initiated on the network, companies can immediately perform more complex analyses based on an expanded set of variables, including cost centers, purchase price variances and micro regions, and receive results in real time.

Leveraging SAP Lumira, the company’s visualization software, companies can see and interact with their data in new ways and outline more informed strategies that advance their business goals. Suppliers, for instance, for the first time can access their complete transaction history with a given customer, and create intuitive data visualizations that allow them to understand how their payment cycles are trending or whether their invoice rejection rates are improving.

Andrew Bartolini, chief research officer of Ardent Partners, an independent research firm in Boston, said, “With the Ariba Network on SAP HANA, you now have the co-location of transactional information, communication that supports those transactions, and the ability to quickly analyze and make decisions based upon that, all within one central location.”

The new capabilities, which can be added on an opt-in basis, can provide buyers and sellers with complete flexibility and choice to meet the demands of their business and accelerate the results that they deliver.

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