HP has called on the channel to help it bring the promise of Big Data to the market with the launch of its expanded converged system portfolio for SAP HANA.
The call comes as HP delivers the largest SAP-certified solution to date - the new ConvergedSystem 900 - under an HP and SAP co-innovation initiative entitled project Kraken at SAP Sapphire Now 2014.
HP director and general manager, server and converged systems, South Pacific, Raj Thakur, said the market was at crossroads, and that HP was looking for more partners who could take their end-to-end solution to the market place.
"It enables the channel to bring the promise of Big Data and analytics to our customer set," he said.
"There’s very few converged end-to-end systems that channel partners can take to customers. This is a to move into high value services.
"It's a really quick way for them to get into this as-a-service model.
Thakur said HP would take away the pain for channel partners to get Big Data as-a-service systems up and running.
"Channel partners can provide this as a service and shift into cloud service environments," he said.
"An end-to-end strategy will allow channel partners to participate in bringing analytics to the market place.
"We are now working very hard to start opening this up to more channel partners and a larger ecosystem."
Thakur said the biggest challenge was for the channel to understand who the decision makers were around big data analytics.
"It’s the line of business," he said.
"They push the need for analytics and many traditional channel partners take it to the IT part of the business."
The new HP ConvergedSystem 900 for SAP HANA is certified by SAP to deliver up to 12 terabytes of data in a single memory pool to power the most mission-critical business applications.
It is a massively system that enables clients to manage and analyse extremely large and diverse data sets from a single system to allow real-time business decisions.
In addition, the system’s flexible configurations and high availability let clients consolidate mission-critical business apps to a centralised platform, helping reduce costs and simplifying the IT environment.
Thakur said businesses were adopting SAP HANA to make real-time business decisions based on massive data sets, but were often constrained by their infrastructure’s scalability and availability,”
“With HP ConvergedSystem 900 for SAP HANA, HP is helping customers achieve business transformation with SAP HANA by delivering what we believe is a system optimised for the largest, most mission-critical workloads.”
The CS 900 is the third release, and follow the CS 100 and 500. The 500 being the best suited to SMBs.
The CS 900 is designed to deliver a rapid return on investment.
It is preconfigured, optimised and tested by HP Factory Express, enabling clients to order, install and operate the system in as little as 30 days.
Thakur said HP and IDC expected see 30-40 per cent growth year to year on converged systems.
"This is exciting for us and our channel partners we are working very hard at making sure our partners are taking these products to market."
HP is also bringing new cloud-based services to SAP HANA through HP Helion Business Applications for SAP solutions.
This solution extends the power of the cloud across infrastructure, applications and information.
It is also built on HP Converged Infrastructure, the managed cloud combines server, storage and network resources to provide customers with a secure hosted environment to run critical business applications with high availability from multiple locations—reducing latency. It is capable of meeting data-sovereignty requirements.
The HP Helion Business Applications deployment model may also be enabled via the HP as-a-Service Offering for SAP HANA.
According to a company statement, this lets clients take advantage of the platform while financing through an OpEx consumption model for predictable monthly payment options that align operational and financial requirements to the business.
SAP senior vice president, corporate business, Kevin Ichhpurani, said the partnership with HP had always been about co-innovating and collaborating to provide new technology solutions that helped customers transform their business.
“The new HP ConvergedSystem 900 for SAP HANA further extends the power of SAP HANA into enterprise organisations, supporting massive data sets and mission-critical workloads, speeding up response times and reducing costs, all in a single platform, near real-time environment,” he said.
