US: SAP has announced that Esri now supports the SAP HANA® platform, a market-leading in-memory data and application development platform, as an enterprise geodatabase. This allows Esri to provide customers with greater insights, improved business decisions and a swifter ability to innovate. Esri and SAP customers will benefit from enhanced performance and scalability as well as full integration of both enterprise and spatial data. The announcement was made at DistribuTECH Conference 2018, which took place between Jan. 23“25.

Whether on-premise or in the cloud, the Esri geodatabase powered by SAP HANA allows spatial data to be integrated and delivered across organizations and accessed from one place for true IT landscape consolidation. It also lowers total cost of ownership (TCO) and administration costs.

The full unification of SAP HANA and Esri is a very big win for our expansive joint customer base, said Bernd Leukert, Member of the Executive Board of SAP SE, Products & Innovation, SAP. We have many customers running SAP, non-SAP and Esri solutions. They will now be able to streamline their IT architecture with one underlying platform powered by SAP HANA. This will not only support immediate return on investment by reducing redundancies and improving performance but also pave the way for further innovation by connecting GIS and enterprise systems and data.

The partnership between SAP and Esri brings powerful location intelligence to enterprise data and applications. It will allow businesses to thrive through spatial analytics and advanced visualizations, and by embedding geospatial data into core business processes.

We're extremely proud to announce SAP HANA as a supported enterprise geodatabase, said Jack Dangermond, founder and president, Esri. GIS and mapping combined with the richness of business data and business processes is a very powerful combination that can benefit every industry. Together, SAP and Esri are making GIS, mapping, advanced visualizations and spatial analytics available to everyone across the enterprise.

Fairfax Water to Geo-Enable its organization for deeper customer insights

Fairfax Water is Virginia's largest water utility, responsible for providing nearly 2 million people with clean drinking water. Now that SAP HANA is a supported Esri enterprise geodatabase, the utility will be able to geo-enable its organization to ensure customers receive the highest possible water quality.

We're very excited about the Esri enterprise geodatabase support for SAP HANA, said Jeff Smith, business process analyst EAM, Fairfax Water. It will simplify our IT landscape, increase processing performance, provide seamless integration between our enterprise SAP data and Esri GIS data, as well as allow us to geo-enable our entire organization. Ultimately, we will be able make better and faster critical business and operational decisions.

Omaha M.U.D. looks to Geospatial Analytics to serve its citizens better

The Metropolitan Utilities District (M.U.D.), a political subdivision and public corporation, operates the drinking water and natural gas systems for Omaha, Nebraska, and surrounding areas. By deploying Esri's ArcGIS on the SAP HANA platform, Omaha M.U.D. aims to provide its field personnel with more timely and powerful analytics by simplifying and digitalizing its manual utility inspection system.

Deploying Esri's ArcGIS directly on the SAP HANA platform will allow us to perform real-time analytics on our business data without the tedious data preparation and conversion processes we do today, said Tommy Acers II, manager, geographic information systems, Omaha M.U.D. Removing these manual tasks will reduce IT efforts, increase the timeliness and accuracy of our analysis and help our field personnel operate more effectively and efficiently. We also anticipate completely new use cases and capabilities, which the integrated platforms that SAP and Esri will offer us.

First SAP + Esri Spatial Hackathon to invigorate the GIS Developer Ecosystem

The SAP + Esri Spatial Hackathon is designed to generate innovative geospatial customer use cases by combining Esri's ArcGIS and the capabilities of SAP HANA. The participants compete to solve real-world problems using modern technology approaches and methodologies, including spatial, graph, analytics, machine learning and AI. There will also be a challenge that supports United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. GIS developers, enterprise architects, application developers, data scientists, business intelligence professionals and students are welcome to enter the contest taking place on March 3, before the Esri Developer Summit.