As utilities continue to embark on their digital transformation journeys, they are looking for innovative ways to leverage their technology investments to align with their digital strategies. This week I had the privilege to participate at the SAP and ESRI Geo-spatial Innovation Day hosted at the SAP Palo Alto Co-Innovation Lab (COIL). This innovation day was the first joint Esri and SAP event of its kind, which was focused on delivering value for the customers. The event was purposely designed to bring a large sample of different sized utilities together to gain an understanding of the partnership between SAP and Esri, gain insights into the enabling business values and then discover ‘the art of the possible’ on how these technologies are applied to solve business challenges.
The day started with an update on the long standing 25 Year Partnership between Esri and SAP. Utilities have always seen the value of bringing Esri and SAP together, but as both companies have evolved, so has the integration capabilities. In 2018 it was announced that Esri has direct integration with SAP HANA. In 2019, Esri certified the SAP Cloud Platform, SAP HANA service. This is the first-ever database as a service that is fully supported by Esri ArcGIS technology. This is the first-ever database as a service that is fully supported by Esri ArcGIS technology.
Organizations can now run SAP HANA as the underlying multi model database service and take advantage of increased performance, lower total cost of ownership and easier integration of enterprise data with spatial data either on premise, in the cloud or in a hybrid deployment.
As the day progressed the focused shifted to understanding customer challenges and areas of opportunities. This was led by a customer presentation from SDG&E discussing their SAP HANA and Esri road map, followed by a customer led panel session involving a panel of subject matter experts.
The highlight of the day was the afternoon breakout discussion groups where mixed teams were tasked with answering two key questions:
- What challenges are you facing today?
- If you could wave a wand, what you do?
This session provided great insight into the challenge’s utilities are currently looking to solve, but also enabled some visionary and strategic thinking on where they see the greatest opportunities. While each team provided some unique perspective there were emerging common threads that were clearly identified including
- Getting to the single source of truth
- Seamless Integration
- Mobility requirements, Providing pervasive access of data from desktop to the field
- Reducing technical debt and integration issues and thus improving performance
- Actionable data and analytics
In the ‘the art of the possible’ users are looking to answer the questions of what we can do now that we couldn’t do before. The integration of SAP HANA and Esri brings together two platform providers that allow utilities to bring data together, integrate systems, gain insights and share across organizations with high performance and scalability. My takeaway from this session: our joint customers can Bring their SAP HANA data to life with ArcGIS Enterprise and deliver a comprehensive mapping and analytics platform. ArcGIS Enterprise puts collaboration and flexibility at the center of their organization's GIS. It pairs industry-leading mapping and analytics capabilities with a dedicated Web GIS infrastructure to organize and share work on any device, anywhere, at any time.
To find out more about the Esri and SAP strategic Alliance please visit
https://www.esri.com/en-us/about/esri-partner-network/our-partners/global-alliances/sap-hana-esri/ov...
