Tuesday 29th April, 2014

SAP has today announced that Ariba is moving to SAP HANA. The initial step, involving the transition of Ariba Spend Visibiliity, was completed with zero down time, and the company is now ready to shift the Ariba Network to the platform, which will enable participants in the business-to-business trading community to gain new insights into their operations and act on them more quickly than ever to drive unprecedented business outcomes and competitive advantage.

The Ariba Network on SAP HANA will create an entirely new cloud offering. Companies will 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 world’s largest, most global business network. Leveraging the speed and power of SAP HANA, they can instantly process this information and enable innovative processes that dramatically improve their performance and productivity.

“We always knew the true potential of the SAP HANA platform would be realised by the applications that run on top,” said 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 will gain unprecedented real-time insights and transparency into their business networks. The network is a powerful example of the business value that only SAP can deliver in the cloud.”

As SAP moves the Ariba Network to SAP HANA,  the company says that organisations will be able to analyse the vast volumes of information they have on their businesses faster than ever before. This includes structured data on production, marketing, sales and pricing, HR, 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 centres, purchase price variances and micro regions, and receive results in real time.

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

“This really represents the ultimate Big Data opportunity,” said Andrew Bartolini, chief research officer of Ardent Partners, an independent research firm in Boston. “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 analyse and make decisions based upon that, all within one central location. And that’s very powerful.”