CenterPoint Energy Houston Electric to Modernize Legacy System with SAP HANA Vora and Hadoop
SAP SE today announced general availability of SAP HANA Vora, an in-memory query engine that brings powerful contextual analytics across all data stored in Hadoop, enterprise systems and other distributed data sources. To facilitate distributed data processing across enterprise and Hadoop data, SAP has contributed part of the code for SAP HANA Vora to the Apache Spark open source ecosystem.
SAP also announced that CenterPoint Energy Houston Electric (CenterPoint Energy) will implement the SAP HANA platform and SAP HANA Vora to bring together its highly distributed enterprise data framework. While Hadoop will allow CenterPoint Energy to reduce information technology costs associated with increasing Big Data storage requirements, SAP HANA Vora will allow for more informed business decisions through powerful data analytics.
CenterPoint Energy to Innovate for Customers
Delivering power to more than 2.3 million consumers, CenterPoint Energy collects electronic meter data every 15 minutes for energy usage reporting, which leads to substantial data storage costs. Within six weeks, SAP and CenterPoint Energy architected a testing environment that processed over 5 billion records of data with Hadoop, SAP HANA and SAP HANA Vora. As a result of its successful test deployment, CenterPoint Energy will implement and standardize on the SAP HANA platform and SAP HANA Vora.
“Our initial analysis proved that SAP HANA paired with SAP HANA Vora is the right solution for us moving forward operationally, while allowing for innovation around our Internet of Things and predictive analytics initiatives,” said Gary Hayes, CIO and SVP of CenterPoint Energy.
“With the help of SAP, we are transforming to a ‘live’ digital enterprise to better serve customers.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdW2YMzc71I
Digitizing Businesses with SAP HANA Vora
A recent report titled “The Forrester Wave: Big Data Hadoop Distributions, Q1 2016” stated, “On average, between 60% and 73% of all data within an enterprise goes unused for business intelligence (BI) and analytics. That’s unacceptable in an age where deeper, actionable insights, especially about customers, are a competitive necessity.”
“As organizations begin their journey toward becoming smarter digital enterprises, the natural starting point and enabler is their core in-memory technology platform,” said Greg McStravick, general manager and global head of Platform GTM, SAP.
“With SAP HANA and SAP HANA Vora, customers can turn massive amounts of Big Data into business context. We are pleased to work with companies like CenterPoint Energy who value the customer service enhancements that a single, end-to-end digital enterprise platform linking corporate data, social sentiment and other data such as weather patterns can provide.”
SAP HANA Vora leverages and extends the Apache Spark execution framework to provide enriched interactive analytics on Hadoop. The core foundation of SAP HANA is complemented by SAP HANA Vora, which is designed to add insight across large volumes of operational and contextual data taken from enterprise applications, data warehouses, data lakes and edge Internet of Things sensors.
SAP HANA Vora aims to solve key Big Data challenges by providing:
- Data correlation for making precise contextual decisions  Enables mashup of operational business data with external unstructured data sources for more powerful analytics
- Simplified management of Big Data  Allows data to be processed locally on a Hadoop cluster, removing any data ownership and integration challenges
- Online analytical processing (OLAP) modeling capabilities on Hadoop data  Makes real-time drill-down analysis possible on large volumes of Hadoop data distributed across thousands of nodes
SAP HANA Vora is targeted at benefiting customers in various industries where highly interactive Big Data analytics in a business process context is paramount, such as financial services, telecommunications, utilities, healthcare and manufacturing. SAP has an established partner ecosystem, including Cloudera, Databricks, Hortonworks and MapR Technologies, that plans to support SAP HANA Vora.
Supporting the Apache Spark Community
SAP has recently open-sourced new features to the Apache Spark ecosystem, one of the most active open source communities. These features include a data hierarchy capability that enables drill-down analysis on Hadoop data, and an extension to Spark’s data source application program interface (API) that improves distributed query efficiency from Spark to SAP HANA.
These open source offerings are now available as a GitHub project. SAP plans to strengthen its commitment to the developer community by continuing to make more open source contributions in the future.
