Blog originally posted on the HDS SAP Community by Hubert Yoshida
Hitachi Data Systems has partnered with SAP to bring an integrated platform that drives real-time reporting and analytics. With SAP HANA platform’s innovative in-memory database enabling analysis of massive data sets combined with Hitachi’s Unified Compute Platform’s future proof architecture offering outstanding performance, reliability and scalability, business users have instant access to knowledge to make more informed and timely decisions.
Customers like the Russian Railways have used the converged UCP for SAP HANA solution to achieve amazing results. A monthly cost-allocation analysis, which would take up to three days in the past, now takes 20 minutes. Database access has sped up by 300 times with access time decreasing from 117 sec. to 0.35 sec. Their SAP Business Warehouse subsystem performance has increased five times and the total volume of stored information has decreased by three times. This was with their first implementation in financial planning and accounting. The Executive Board of Russian Railways has set a goal to switch the majority of their analytic services like tax and other accounting services to SAP HANA to achieve even greater efficiencies and cost savings.
While we look forward to additional enhancements in this area, especially with SAP S4/HANA, the Information Technology world in which we’ve lived in for so long is evolving. Information Technology and the transactional business which we operate in is now integrating with Operational Technology - the technology of the Internet of Things. Technology on the edge, such as smart devices, sensor data, and the ability for control system to be integrated in with our traditional Information Technology. The integration of the business and human data with this machine data is where Hitachi Data Systems can extend our partnership with SAP to drive digital transformation and enable new types of innovation and creativity in all aspects of human society.
Now we need to expand information technology to operational technology as the “Internet of Things” drives the need for digital transformation in our business. Operational technology is not new. It is actually a big part of our Hitachi Industrial solutions. While business data has been about structured data, data that fits in rows and columns, operational data is about sensors, meters, click streams, machine to machine information. Business must now integrate operational data into their information workflows.
UCP for SAP HANA is an optimized platform for Business driven data that is structured, but machine driven data is unstructured and comes in many different forms and formats in very large quantities, and the value derived from unstructured data often comes from the correlation and visualization of different streams of data, for instance a heat map of certain activity correlated with incident reporting to predict an outcome. While a scale up system may be the best solution for transactional data, a scale out system is a better solution for operational data. Key to the integration of business and operational data is a data integration tool that can connect structured and unstructured data. The best tool for integrating structured and unstructured data is the Pentaho Data Integration (PDI), a component of the Pentaho Enterprise Platform. This platform also provides analytics, visualization, dashboards, reports and advanced analytics with embedded and predictive analytics. This slide shows PDI connectors to a variety of structured and unstructured data.
Hitachi also provides a scale out platform, the Hyper Scale-out platform (HSP), which offers a software-defined architecture to centralize and support easy storing and processing of these large datasets with high availability, simplified management and a pay-as-you-grow model. Delivered as a fully configured, turnkey appliance, HSP takes hours instead of months to install and supports production workloads, and simplifies creation of an elastic data lake that helps customers easily integrate disparate datasets and run advanced analytic workloads. HSP offers native integration with the Pentaho Enterprise platform to give customers complete control of the analytic pipeline from real time in-memory analysis of business data with SAP HANA, combined with unstructured operational data from HSP through Pentaho.
Transactional data is still the core for enterprise business and no one provides more value than SAP for real time business analytics. Hitachi Data Systems enables the capture and integration of operational data with business data to provide a 360 view for new opportunities and insight. SAP and Hitachi Data Systems working together will help enterprises extend the value of their current investments, and position them for innovation and future opportunities.
Hitachi partners with SAP for their own IoT projects. One such project is the Intercity Express Program in the UK where Hitachi will replace a 40 year old diesel intercity train system with state of the art electric trains from Hitachi. During the conversion from diesel to electric, Hitachi will manufacture bi-modal trains which will be able to run diesel or electric until all the tracks are converted to electric. Once the tracks are converted, the diesel engines will be removed to run the lighter electric trains for less wear on the tracks. Hitachi will manufacture and maintain these trains in the UK. Hitachi has also converted their “Shinkansen” train control system to the European train control system and is providing this as a “train as a Service” (TaaS). Hitachi is assuming the upfront capital risk for rolling stock and maintenance and is confident that they can make this profitable for their investors through the use of big data and IoT. Hitachi has contracted Capgemini to provide SAP based IT support for its manufacturing and maintenance facilities. A unique feature of this proposal is the integration of manufacturing with maintenance, reflecting the importance which Hitachi attaches to providing "a comprehensive long-term service to its customers".
Hitachi will be at SAP Saphire in Orlando Florida May 17 to 19. View this link for a schedule of presentations from Hitachi Data Systems, Hitachi Consulting, and Pentaho view the following demo’s at Hitachi booth #119.
- Predictive crime analytics for Smart Cities
- IoT at work with Hitachi train systems and construction machinery
- Predictive analytics solutions for telco and media
- BI in-a-box – Real-time business insight integrating SAP S/4 HANA and Hadoop
- SAP Managed Tags:
