SAP made the announcement at SAP TechEd, held last week in Las Vegas.

Introduced in September 2016, SAP HANA Express Edition has become a popular choice for application developers seeking to build smart applications and analytics solutions.

Daniel Schneiss, senior vice president and global head of SAP HANA development, SAP, said the edition is “designed so developers can quickly start building powerful data-driven applications that deliver unforeseen insights from live data, using their programming language of choice. We will continue to expand cloud options for SAP HANA, offering developers the flexibility to choose the cloud platform that they prefer.”

SAP and Google Cloud also announced the results of the Intelligent App Challenge, which was initiated at the SAPPHIRE NOW conference in May 2017. The winners included VASPP, which created an app for easy charting of diverse SAP-sourced data for business analytics, and BOHH Labs, whose app secures data in transit to avoid breaches and increase compliance. Other finalists included Infosys, Mexbalia and SmartDocs.

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The SDK allows customers, partners and independent software vendors to develop custom applications to extend the capabilities of SAP S/4HANA Cloud, using code samples and best-practice content. Developers can also access a data model, set of APIs, and testing tools.

“Organizations today are facing challenges to keep up with the pace of change, while maintaining core business processes and adhering to industry regulations,” said Christian Pedersen, chief product officer, SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP.

“With SAP S/4HANA Cloud SDK running on SAP Cloud Platform, developers have the tools to create and test high-quality custom solutions that foster innovation. This gives customers, partners and ISVs the opportunity to take an active role in the cloud economy and benefit from the new business that this will inevitably usher in.”

SAP worked with more than a dozen partners to get real-time feedback as it developed the SDK. msg systems ag is one which has already utilised the tools to create a new product.

“SAP S/4HANA Cloud SDK empowered us to create an industry reinsurance software-as-a-service offering that we can quickly bring to market,” said Andreas Weiss, head of business development, msg systems. “Our ability to tap the open data model of SAP S/4HANA Cloud on SAP Cloud Platform combined with the hands-on support and expertise of the SAP team has allowed us to create our solution seamlessly to provide a superior, timely offering for customers.”

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With Gartner predicting that smart machines will be a top five investment property for more than 30 per cent of CIOs by 2020, SAP is helping organisations get ahead of the curve.

A new solution, “brand intelligence” developed by the SAP Innovation Center Network, will analyse brand exposure in video and images by leveraging deep learning. The solution will be released in beta by the end of the first quarter of 2017, and is designed to help advertisers gain accurate, real-time insights into sponsoring and advertising ROI.

SAP has also launched a new partner program for SAP Application Intelligence. Participants will include SAP global services and technology partners and solution extension partners, as well as technology providers and machine learning startups, with the program designed to smooth the path for customers to consumer partner solutions based on ML and artificial intelligence by promoting interface certification and platform compatibility.

Finally, a new massive open online course on ‘Enterprise Machine Learning in a Nutshell’ will also begin on openSAP on November 14. Present by Dr Markus Noga, vice president for machine learning at SAP, and Dr Daniel Dahlmeier, leader of the Natural Language Processing team at SAP Innovation Center Network, focusing on how to leverage machine learning for business outcomes.

“SAP’s vision for machine learning and artificial intelligence goes way beyond one business application. It’s about creating business value by infusing our entire set of solutions with more intelligence, and providing a platform for our employees and an ecosystem to build machine learning solutions on,” said Juergen Mueller, chief innovation at SAP.

IoT Application Enablement solution released

SAP also introduced an SAP Internet of Things (IoT) Application Enablement solution, based on the HANA Cloud Platform, to help customers and partners develop IoT solutions efficiently.

The solution allows users to create an enhanced virtual representation of a product, service or process, by combining sensor data, business data and contextual data. The product includes development environment and tools, micro services and smart data storage, and integration to business processes and applications.

“SAP IoT Application Enablement provides a powerful virtual model that shows how a thing will operate with real time data over its lifetime,” said Tanja Rueckert, executive vice president, digital assets and IoT, SAP.

“It also delivers an IoT tailored development environment that promotes development efficiencies and provides a common foundation across all apps. Customers are now able to develop IoT solutions efficiently, with a reduction in errors and ultimately an increased time to market.”

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The service uses the SAP HANA platform to make Earth observation data consumable both through the newly available Earth Observation Analysis service, as well as in urban and environmental use cases.

“The European Sentinel satellites are the largest providers of Earth observation data worldwide. A major challenge is to convert this fantastic data into customer-specific information. Large-scale hosted processing is the next step in order to meet their challenge, thereby bringing users to the data rather than data to the users,” said Josef Aschbacher, director, Earth observation, ESA.

The service provides a standardised interface and an application programming interface (API) that provides continuous access to historical and real-time satellite data. It is expected to be used by government agencies and companies in a range of industries – from insurance to mining, utilities and retail, to gain insight into questions such as where to place new power lines, where to build a new store or when to harvest copes.

“Our partnership with ESA paves the way to a new field of geospatial business applications, making it possible to close the gap between traditional Earth observation and a digitalized business world,” said Dr Carsten Linz, business development officer and global head, Center for Digital Leadership, SAP. “That opens a bright future for space-related applications, such as digital farming, gas pipeline management, and the improved planning of smart cities – bringing businesses to a competitive edge, creating new high-tech jobs and improving peoples’ lives.”

The Earth Observation Analysis service can initially be tested at no cost in a non-productive environment until 31 December this year, with the service to be generally available in the first quarter of 2017 with a consumption-based pricing model based on the number of API calls made.

SAP also plans to release a set of related micro services based on HANA to help parties build flexible solutions using the ESA Earth observation data in the future.

At SAP’s TechEd event in Barcelona, reinsurance company Munich Re showcased its use of the Earth Observation Analysis service to gain insight and predict potential future impact from historic and current data.

“Every year, wildfires affect nature, people, their homes and business,” said Andreas Siebert, head of geospatial solutions, Munich Re. “While the progress of a fire itself is hard to predict, this new service from SAP, leveraging satellite data from ESA, allows us to accurately calculate costs and risks related to wildfires and even gain insights into the future probability of wildfires. This will help us to keep costs down for our clients.”

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