Cisco and SAP announced a collaboration to deliver optimised business intelligence solutions for enterprise, service provider and midmarket customers through SAP High-Performance Analytic Appliance (SAP HANA) on the Cisco Unified Computing System server platform.

The relationship provides significant value to customers by giving them the power to gain instant insight into business operations while enabling them to react quickly to changing business conditions.

As consumer technologies proliferate along with virtual machines in the business environment, the volume, velocity and variety of data have increased. Access to such data is critical for business decision-making as well as market analysis. This announcement is a direct response to the need for real-time access to large volumes of transactional information.

SAP HANA is a multipurpose, data-source agnostic, in-memory appliance that forms the technology foundation for innovative applications. It handles business applications such as planning, forecasting, operational performance and simulation. SAP HANA's optimisation rides on the Cisco Unified Computing System, which substantially increases the memory footprint and improves the performance of and capacity for demanding virtualisation and large-data-set workloads.

"The age of business analytics is here. SAP Business Intelligence allows companies of all sizes to gain business insights by tapping into their operational data in real time, allowing company executives to analyse, decide, operate and adapt anytime, anywhere, on device, on demand and on premise," said Tim Moylan, President of Southeast Asia at SAP.

"The Cisco and SAP relationship results in a globally connected, real-time, borderless enterprise that accelerates innovation. Organisations demand as-they-happen insight into business operations to enable prompt reaction. The memory capacity of server systems plays an important role in ensuring the overall performance of business applications, and this collaboration between SAP and Cisco provides an intelligent blend of technical capabilities. Our mutual customers have found that optimised, responsive, and real-time analytics, in the changing market conditions of today, are required to keep their businesses agile and competitive," said Anne Abraham, managing director of Cisco in Malaysia at the Cisco Summit Malaysia 2011.

This innovative collaboration with SAP has been validated by the survey responses of information technology managers in the Cisco Connected Technology World Report: Part III, Data Centre, released in December 2010. About a third (32 percent) percent of the respondents indicated that improving agility and speed in deploying business applications will be their top priority for the data centre over the next three years, and 40 percent said that the increase in applications and data will most impact their data centre.

According to a Gartner report, the Asia Pacific business intelligence platform market is set to grow to US$819 million in 2014 at a compound annual growth rate of 11.4 percent. Malaysia will continue as the second-largest business intelligence market in the region, with an expected CAGR of 9.4 percent, to reach US$18.4 million by 2014, primarily due to the growing need for the nation to increase its competitiveness against other markets and to make incremental investments in infrastructure to attract foreign investment.1

The Cisco Unified Computing System is the first fabric computing platform that combines industry-standard, x86-architecture servers with networking and storage access to a single converged system. Since it was introduced in 2009, the Cisco Unified Computing System has captured more than 40 world records in application performance. On April 5, 2011, Cisco announced the results for nine new world record industry benchmarks, highlighting the Cisco Unified Computing System's outstanding performance and productivity across data center workloads.

Cisco has more than 5,400 Cisco Unified Computing System customers spanning all industries and workloads with more than 340 channel partners across the globe who are trained and certified on the Cisco UCS B-Series.

SAP HANA is available in Malaysia through an ecosystem of partners and is timely given the strategic growth opportunities present in the business intelligence platform market in Asia Pacific and Malaysia.