SAP Partners With Apple To Expand iOS In The Enterprise (techcrunch.com)

SAP has announced a partnership with Apple to bring iOS to SAP's enterprise customers. Steve Lucas, president for SAP's Digital Enterprise Platform, says SAP is firmly an enterprise company which has built a cloud platform to access all the software it has developed -- ERP product, SuccessFactors or Concur. With the new deal, Apple hopes to take a bite out of Microsoft's territory by selling hardware to companies who traditionally shop for PCs. In an effort to push iOS to its customers, SAP has announced a new set of apps for the iPhone and iPad that take advantage of data stored in SAP tools. They're providing an iOS SDK for its in-memory database product, SAP HANA, to allow organizations to build their own customized apps using the data stored in HANA. SAP is also offering SAP Academy for iOS as a way for SAP programmers to learn to use the HANA iOS SDK. The deal between Apple and SAP echoes the deal from a couple years ago between Apple and IBM.

Comments

really? bean counter software?

[tommeke100]

SAP interfaces are true eye candy. A natural fit for Apple :) Steve Jobs would have loved this move!

Re: really? bean counter software?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is like two super villains joining forces. Fortunately, they will only prey on big businesses.

Re: really? bean counter software?

[Anonymous Coward]

A match made in Hell. I get goosebumps just thinking about it. Deliver us from this evil...

Re:really? bean counter software?

[Anonymous Coward]

What?! Not the SAP I know.
I'm sure you can build your own pretty front end tough, because SAP is all about hiring consultants to customize it for you.

Which is why this story isn't all that surprising when I thought about it for a second.

They're providing an iOS SDK for its in-memory database product, SAP HANA, to allow organizations to build their own customized apps using the data stored in HANA.

It's something else you can pay someone to customize for you. Fits right in with their M.O.

Re:really? bean counter software?

[Hognoxious]

You're a bit behind the times. https://www.sapfioritrial.com/

IOS??

[AF_Cheddar_Head]

Hell, Cisco brought that to the enterprise years ago and it still sucks.

HANA

[Britz]

I realize this is a bit offtopic, but I was always curious why HANA is such a big deal. Can't you add a lot of ram to any computer running a traditional dbms and linux will cache it into ram, because it will cache used memory pages? Also couldn't you simply put the db onto a ram drive?

Last year I was at a trade exhibition (CeBit), where SAP hat a huge booth. All they delivered at a presentation was hot air and advertising. So is there anything special about HANA except for the fact that it was developed fairly recently and thus has a contemporary design, probably giving it a couple advantages over dbms designed in the 90s or earlier.

Re:HANA

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL, shades of my 386.

Ran a barcode reader program that looked up the description and more on the fly. Simply maxxed out the ram at like 12 MB and loaded both the lookup database and the useage database on a ram drive and it was quick enough to do it all in real time. Did things with PC-File that the author hadn't thought of :)

It all still functions too. Barcodes on an Epson FX printer are bit rough but useable. Any bets on theirs running for 20 years?!?

I bet it costs a tad more than $69.95* also!

Couldn't pay for the $20 barcode TSR, shareware with bad address, so only spent $49.95

Re:HANA

[erp_consultant]

The traditional bottleneck for any database is disk access speed. Adding RAM and processor speed helps but disk access is by far the slowest operation, even with SSD's. So they basically load the database stack into memory and, as you can imagine, it dramatically speeds things up.

Oracle has a similar feature, which I'm more familiar with than the SAP solution, in Oracle 12c. Basically what they do is separate transactions in two ways. Conventional data (i.e. transactional data - Employees, Chart of Accounts, Invoices, etc.) are maintained in rows and accessed as they normally would be.

Transactional data is represented in a "normalized" way. In other words, lots of small tables with indexes joining them together. This makes it quicker for data retrieval. Analytical data, on the other hand (think multi dimensional data models, star schemas), are typically "de-normalized" to allow the data to be modeled in multiple ways. This slows down data retrieval though because the data is "flatter" with fewer indexes.

What the in memory solution does is represent the analytical data in column mode rather than row mode and load it all into memory. This allows you to perform what is referred to as "Real Time" analytics. In the old days you would load a data warehouse with a nightly batch job, run the analytics reports, and view the results the next morning. Now with in memory databases you can do it more or less in real time. That's the big deal about it.

Re:HANA

[Anonymous Coward]

Working for a SAP consulting job and implementing a SAP module before, here's my take on it:

Technologically speaking, it's not a big deal. You can do everything that you could do with HANA with other technology stacks.

In the context of the SAP landscape it's kind of a big thing. SAP applications are typically build very close to the database. The database is used for everything. Locking of database tables is done by writing an entry in a database table for example. SAP applications are written in a proprietary programming language called ABAP. ABAP has it's own SQL dialect OpenSQL that is integrated very tightly with the language itself. For example, you can do something like this:

SELECT * FROM db_table INTO struct WHERE f = 5.
        WRITE struct.
ENDSELECT.

That will select all entries in the database table db_table into the structure struct where the field f has value 5 and then print the content.

Because of that, a lot of SAP applications are written very close to the database. It is a lot like access for the enterprise. Obviously, the database is the performance bottleneck for all SAP applications. SAP needs HANA otherwise they would have to throw away their whole application suite. HANA let's them keep the applications and improve them step by step.

Re:HANA

[raftpeople]

Column store, highly compressed, highly parallel, optimized for large non-aggregated data set usage, sql extensions to simplify coding/consumption. The idea (and from what I read it sounds like they are succeeding) was to create a very high performance db that allows using large sets of non-aggregated OLTP data in real time thus reducing or eliminating the need for a separate data warehouse.

Re:HANA

[tlhIngan]

Do they not realize that iOS devices don't have as much RAM as even Android phones? (iOS is more efficient with memory usage yes, but it does suffer from RAM limits on certain operations).

I mean, the latest have 2GB of RAM, but iOS also limits how much RAM an app can use...

Re:HANA

[jittles]

Do they not realize that iOS devices don't have as much RAM as even Android phones? (iOS is more efficient with memory usage yes, but it does suffer from RAM limits on certain operations).

I mean, the latest have 2GB of RAM, but iOS also limits how much RAM an app can use...

You won't be storing the all the DB info in RAM. i worked with SAP on this years ago and have no idea what the current state is but we did find that you could handle about 10M records on SQLite3 on iOS if you were careful with your SQL. The real problem with DB storage on iOS is that the flash is typically slow to write and incredibly fast to read. Anyway, about that time is when they started transitioning to the HANA stuff and I left for another job.

Probably not well known.

[funwithBSD]

but IBM hosts SAPs SaaS offering.

The circle is complete...

Re:Probably not well known.

[Anonymous Coward]

The founders of SAP are ex-IBMers

Far sighted move

[Trachman]

And a step to the future. And a competitive edge.

A lot of work is done by people doing it remotely. Approvals, postings, reviews.

If software is implemented properly it can be a huge boost of productivity.

Never go full retard

[EmperorOfCanada]

I was having an argument with a guy last night. I was saying that apple has no credible products in the pipeline. He was arguing that they have the electric car coming. I had a few counter arguments and we agreed to disagree. Then he sent me a link to this story today and fully agrees, apple is screwed.

What it boils down to is that Microsoft tried harder and harder over the years to cram me into their ecosystem. Sharepoint would be the day that I vowed to never go back to Microsoft. Sharepoint, was and always will be a giant steaming turd. It is an excellent IQ test for any organization. If they have a sharepoint monster at the heart of their communications then that organization is the equivalent of a drooling moron.

SAP would be another one of those litmus tests. More of a living proof that a sucker is born every minute. If Tim Cook gets into bed with these predators all they will do is try to screw anything they can out of corporate users of MS, sorry, Apple products and then proceed to have necrotic sex with the damp cold corpse that apple will become.

What Tim Cook also doesn't realize is that SAP is the embodiment of the MBA. This magical thinking that enough massaging of a spreadsheet is the equivalent of actual work. That reports about nothing are somehow more important than actual productivity. But one skill that MBAs hone is the ability to alter reality to their desires. They change the rules around them thinking that altered reality is reality. This is the sort of thing where they will slide into the company, fiddle with the board of directors, and push Mr Cook out a window. There will be an announcement that he is looking forward to spending more time with his family.

I will sum this up with a prediction. Within 5 years there will be an SAP favourable person running Apple.

Re:Never go full retard

[Anonymous Coward]

SAP is like the dogshit midas. Everything it touches turns into a steaming pile of dogshit. Must be the only ERP pile-of-crap that actually lowers productivity by half and at the same time creates a reality altering smokescreen to deceive the upper management. Or they just pay off the upper management, or provide BEAUTIFULL reports that gently whisper "everythnig will be ok" to upper management and fills their breains with cotton candy and cute puppies.

Great News for us Apple Haters

[drinkypoo]

SAP is named for what they do to your company's will to live, whether you're a partner or a customer. Apple could literally have not picked a worse partner. Time to make the popcorn