Johannesburg, 05 Mar 2013
SAP (NYSE: SAP) today announced the SAP Business One, version for SAP HANA, the first business management solution for small and midsize enterprises (SMEs) running fully in-memory.
The application is a scalable, affordable solution with embedded analytics capabilities and high-volume transactions to empower SMEs to run their businesses in real-time. The announcement was made at CeBIT 2013, being held from 5-9 March, in Hannover, Germany, where SAP showcases comprehensive solutions, technologies and services for businesses of all sizes and in all industries.
The version of SAP Business One, version for SAP HANA, in restricted shipment today, will offer the complete small business essentials in one single user interface, helping users operate their businesses from end-to-end - from operational to strategic level and with improved visibility and control. This ability is essential for small businesses in Africa that often require enterprise-quality solutions but are restricted by resources. SAP Business One, version for SAP HANA, will help address this challenge and enable companies of all sizes to dramatically reduce reporting response times, enabling employees to be both more productive and more effective in their decision-making.
The speed offered by in-memory computing will help African small businesses answer previously unsolvable problems, and will allow all users to become more efficient by leveraging out-of-the-box features of the application for enhanced user experience. These include enterprise search and powerful interactive operational analysis, all of which enable business workers to deal with information in their daily work more effectively.
"It was a simple decision - the future has knocked at our door and Antarc simply grabbed the opportunity to go with the innovation of SAP," said Neha Malde, Financial Manager, Antarc in Kenya. "We have already seen how SAP Business One has assisted Antarc to grow and create better management and control systems, hence we decided to take the opportunity towards succession."
The ability to gain deeper insight into operational analytics will enable SMEs to accelerate business processes through a platform designed for scalability and better system performance in a highly concurrent environment. This new SAP - HANA-powered application will integrate the capabilities of an in-memory platform with the company's existing SAP Business One. SAP Business One version for SAP HANA also offers real-time business insights from the same system that runs the transactional processing, eliminating the need for a separate data warehouse and thus helping lower costs and reducing the IT landscape complexity. SAP Business One version for SAP HANA will empower small enterprises to cope with the unprecedented growth of big data caused by the convergence of social, device, equipment and corporate data, something which many African companies are grappling with today.
"SMEs contribute to 40% of GDP and 50% of overall employment in the African continent. SAP is committed to helping SMEs in Africa grow their businesses and enabling them to innovate and drive real-time business insight, particularly amid an increasing skills shortage," said Pfungwa Serima, SAP Africa CEO. "More than 79% of SAP's global revenue is generated from our SME customers and the numbers are similar in Africa. SMEs, start-ups and entrepreneurs are Africa's growth engine, and SAP Business One version for SAP HANA platform aims help them grow faster and more efficiently than ever before."
Partners can create a new breed of innovative add-on solutions in their dedicated industry or geographic markets through the integration of SAP HANA with SAP Business One. The offering is planned for exclusive sale by SAP Business One channel partners worldwide. SAP and Portugal Telecom recently announced their plans to make available a developer edition of the SAP Business One application, version for the SAP HANA platform. It is planned to provide developers with a fully configured environment for SAP Business One, version for SAP HANA, to help accelerate development of extensions and add-ons built on the SAP HANA Cloud platform available on SmartCloudPT.
For more information, visit the SAP Newsroom. Follow SAP on Twitter at @sapafrica.
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