June 29th, 2016
SAP Geographical Enablement Framework Simplifies Spatial Processing of Enterprise Business Data

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SAN DIEGO, Calif.— SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today unveiled SAP® Geographical Enablement Framework, powered by SAP HANA®, which helps organizations enrich business applications with geographic data from geographic information systems (GIS), such as Esri ArcGIS. This announcement was made at the Esri User Conference being held June 27–July 1 in San Diego.

“In many asset-intensive industries such as energy, transportation and public sector, the ability to visualize business objects on maps is critical to improving efficiency and decision making,” said Irfan Khan, GM and global head, Database & Data Management, SAP. “SAP Geographical Enablement Framework, powered by SAP HANA, can help organizations streamline the processing of both enterprise and spatial data for greater location awareness across business processes.”

Enriching Business Processes with Geospatial Information

To develop spatially enabled business applications, organizations can use the framework to:

• Enable smooth integration and bidirectional navigation between SAP applications and Esri ArcGIS. Developers can use application programming interfaces (APIs) published by GIS systems to fetch geospatial data. Also, business data augmented with geometric attributes can be published as a service, so that GIS users can access SAP business data from within their GIS tools.
• Embed a responsive map user interface (UI) in a business application to display both business and spatial data simultaneously to provide greater insight.
• Store the geometry of any SAP business object in the SAP HANA platform and accelerate spatial data processing in memory to deliver real-time insights, enriched with spatial context, to improve decision making.
• Visualize, filter and search for business objects — such as functional location, equipment, linear assets, notifications or work orders — on a map from within a spatially enabled application. From a desktop or a tablet, users can also drill down through multiple map layers to gain better insight.

Accelerating Business and Spatial Data Processing with SAP HANA

With continued collaboration between SAP and Esri, organizations can gain contextual insight from business and spatial data, enabling business and GIS users to work within the same multiuser access and editing environment.

“At EDF Renewable Energy, we have built a truly innovative enterprise business intelligence and data warehouse platform that combines Esri geospatial data along with asset sensor data and ERP transactional data in SAP HANA,” said Devang Shah, manager of database and business intelligence, EDF Renewable Energy. “This provides us with near real-time insights to help us operate more efficiently.”

As an open platform, SAP HANA is certified with the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), enabling organizations to easily consume spatial data from third-party spatial solutions that also adhere to the standard. SAP HANA also supports synchronous and asynchronous imports of data from any spatial reference system (SRS) or coordinate reference system (CRS) to ease access to local, regional or global geographic entities. In addition, native geocoding delivered by SAP HANA smart data quality helps rapidly convert addresses to latitude and longitude within SAP HANA.

“Munich Re is one of the leading reinsurance companies in the world,” said Andreas Siebert, head of geospatial solutions at Munich Re. “We use spatial data processing capabilities in SAP HANA, in conjunction with predictive analytics, to assess risk — such as to identify natural hazard profiles for millions of locations around the globe, to efficiently coordinate loss adjustors after a major catastrophe or to calculate how many hospitals, schools and roads may be impacted by an impending hurricane or flood.”

Increasing Location Intelligence with SAP BusinessObjects™ Solutions

SAP is helping breaking down the silos between GIS and business data. Organizations can use the native geospatial features within SAP BusinessObjects™ Cloud and SAP BusinessObjects Lumira software to enrich data with geographic information and map visualizations. Business users can also contextualize business performance metrics by using powerful location intelligence capabilities within SAP Digital Boardroom, experienced through SAP BusinessObjects Cloud.

Business users can overlay business data on maps with detailed geographic information such as topography and satellite imagery. These maps can have multiple layers of different types of data, enabling business users to visualize information in various ways, such as a heat map layer to visualize data density and a choropleth map layer to highlight statistically significant geographic areas using shades or patterns.

“The SAP BusinessObjects BI Location Intelligence application by Galigeo brings the power of location visualization and analytics from Esri to SAP BusinessObjects Lumira, SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio and SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence®,” said Cristian Tapia, CEO at Galigeo. “Users can seamlessly blend their own spatial data into these SAP tools to gain new insights for decision making by fully exploiting the location dimension of their data.”

For more information, visit the SAP News Center. Follow SAP on Twitter at @sapnews.

About SAP

As market leader in enterprise application software, SAP (NYSE: SAP) helps companies of all sizes and industries run better. From back office to boardroom, warehouse to storefront, desktop to mobile device – SAP empowers people and organizations to work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively to stay ahead of the competition. SAP applications and services enable approximately 310,000 business and public sector customers to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and grow sustainably. For more information, visit www.sap.com.