Announcing “SAP HANA Cloud Platform predictive services”

As part of the SAP Predictive Analytics team, I am very proud to announce the immediate availability of  SAP HCP predictive services (HCPps).  Continuing our strategy of “enabling predictive analytics everywhere for everyone”, our Product Team has brought our signature automated predictive capabilities natively to the SAP HANA Cloud Platform (HCP). This is a great achievement because SAP’s automated predictive capabilities are now available on all of your platforms of choice – whether that is a third-party database, SAP HANA, or the Cloud.

What are SAP HCP predictive services?

SAP HCPps allow any HCP application to easily embed our automated analytics capabilities through a standard web-based development model using RESTful Web services.  This opens up new possibilities to more tightly integrate predictive value into user workflows because each service in HCPps corresponds to a specific business need – and delivers a specific kind of business insight.

Customers, developers, and partners that want to embed predictive functionality within their own applications or even extensions to SAP applications can now do it easily – and without requiring complex modeling or the ninja skills of a data scientist.  Instead of figuring out how to create predictive models in HCP and dig into the details of a implementing a predictive library, you can focus on your application development and leave the predictive analytics to us.

How do SAP HCP predictive services work?

In 2015, we brought our automated predictive capabilities to SAP HANA as a native processing engine called the SAP HANA Automated Predictive Library (APL) (for more information, see:What is the SAP Automated Predictive Library (APL) for SAP HANA? ).  This allowed automated predictive calculations to be federated to SAP HANA itself, eliminating the expense and overhead of data extraction for the purposes of analysis.  Customers with SAP HANA could then combine everything the platform offers in terms of speed, scalability, and versatility with the predictive automation of the APL.  Win-Win!

The SAP HANA Cloud Platform (HCP) is built upon SAP HANA infrastructure, so now in 2016, we have not only brought the APL to HCP but have created RESTful Web services to expose that functionality in an even easier to use, language agnostic way that takes full advantage of everything the SAP HANA Cloud Platform offers as well in terms of performance, security, and integration.

What can SAP HCP predictive services do?

SAP HANA Cloud Platform predictive services can bring the following capabilities to any application on SAP HCP:

Time Series Forecasting:

• Analyze time series and predict future values based on the trend, periodicities and fluctuations detected in past data.
• Example: Estimate how many products to order based on forecasted demand.

Key Influencer detection:

• Identify in your dataset what variables influence the most your target and how.
• Example: Identify the drivers of successful sales transactions and how to improve less successful transactions.

Outlier detection:

• Identify the records in your datasets whose target is significantly different from what is expected.
• Example: Detect potentially fraudulent transactions based on abnormal activity

Model-based “What-if” simulations:

• What-if service is a simulation of changes in order to determine who will be impacted and how. This service answers to the question: What will be the variables of a dataset and their values if some of the values of one variable change?
• Examples:
  • Identify what are the variables the most impacted by a change.
  • Gain potential insights by investigating and validating hidden relationship between the planned action and its consequences.

Scoring:

• Apply a predictive model to a new dataset.
• Example:
  • Predict if new customers will churn based on a model that has been trained on your historical customer data.

Where can you find more information? 

Your first stop to learn more is at: SAP HANA Cloud Platform predictive services Starter Kit. This microsite contains everything you need to get started, including documentation, examples, and an FAQ.

Equally important is to become a member of the SAP Predictive Analytics SCN community at: SAP Predictive Analytics | SCN because this is the central hub where our customers, partners, developers, and product managers interact.  If the landing page above doesn’t answer all your questions, the Predictive Analytics SCN site is the place to go!

What’s next?

2016 has just gotten started, so I “predict” some huge things coming to our customers this year.  There will be additional improvements to HCPps, new versions of SAP Predictive Analytics, and a few surprises that we’re not quite ready to share just yet. Keep your eye on the SCN community for the latest and sign up for our SAP Predictive Analytics Newsletter to get our summary of the latest and greatest in the world of predictive. Join here: Be the First to Get Predictive Analytics News, Tips and Tricks