SAP Advances Big Data With KXEN Acquisition

SAP AG  announced plans to acquire KXEN, a leading provider of predictive analytics technology for line-of-business users and analysts. The combination of KXEN and enterprise business intelligence capabilities from SAP, along with the SAP HANA platform is intended to help companies to harness big data, engage users across the enterprise and aims to execute before their competitors to gain advantages they never thought possible.

“With increased demand for actionable insights from ever-growing volumes of data, broader access to predictive analytics is key,” said Henry Morris, senior vice president for Worldwide Software and Services Research, IDC. “KXEN supports this objective by moving predictive analytics into the cloud and inside of the enterprise applications most popular with end users.”

Complimenting advanced analytics from SAP, KXEN's predictive technology can be used to enhance the value of core SAP applications for managing operations, customer relationships, supply chains, risk and fraud. Additionally, the company plans to incorporate KXEN technology into cloud and on-premise SAP applications built on SAP HANA. The acquisition is expected to allow SAP to introduce new predictive capabilities to the portfolio of solutions for more than 25 industries, particularly data-intensive vertical industries such as telecommunications, retail, consumer products, manufacturing and financial services.

“The compelling combination of KXEN with market-leading analytics and business intelligence solutions from SAP intends to deliver the capability organizations need to innovate for growth in high-volume data environments,” said Michael Reh, executive vice president, Business Information Technology, Products and Innovation, SAP. “Just as SAP is revolutionizing visualization, KXEN will allow us to bring predictive analytics to more business users, enabling easier-to-adopt solutions and the delivery of greater value via SAP solutions.”

“We are excited to integrate our leading predictive analytics capabilities with market-leading enterprise BI and agile visualization platforms from SAP, which we expect will result in unmatched analytics breadth and depth in the marketplace,” said John Ball, CEO, KXEN. “Our customers were increasingly asking us to focus on predictive applications that could be easily consumed by the business, both in the cloud and on premise. The real-time big data capabilities of SAP HANA make it the ideal platform to deliver on this vision.”

SAP to Resell Hadoop Solutions

SAP also announced the expansion of big data offerings around three major pillars: the SAP HANA platform, applications enabled for big data and data science. SAP has entered reseller agreements with Intel and Hortonworks to resell and support the Intel Distribution Apache Hadoop and the Hortonworks Data Platform with SAP HANA, expanding existing partnerships with both vendors.

“The SAP HANA platform and its integration with Hadoop have married together real-time insights with extreme storage, solving one of the biggest problems with current big data solutions, a fragmented landscape of solutions that are difficult to connect together,” said Steve Lucas, president, Platform Solutions, SAP. “Our expanded big data strategy provides customers a single, integrated approach to combine enterprise data and additional information to employees and consumers, as well as improve business processes such as customer engagement, preventative maintenance and responsive supply chain.”

Integration with Apache Hadoop is part of SAP’s overall strategy to provide valuable insights across a continuum of data from the efficient storage of massive amounts of cold data, to petabyte-level storage of warm data to real-time and streaming data analysis.

“By reselling the Hortonworks Data Platform, SAP can assure their customers they are deploying an SAP HANA and Hadoop architecture fully supported by SAP, while giving them the benefits of a fully open source Hadoop distribution,” said Shaun Connolly, vice president, Corporate Strategy, Hortonworks. “Hortonworks is committed to contributing all of its innovations back to the Apache project, ensuring that 100 percent of their Hadoop distribution is open source.”