PrescientTraveler are a firm that relies on SAP HANA to deliver their service to keep international travelers safe. For companies with employees that travel the world the responsibility for their safety is key and PrescientTraveler delivers a service that does more than the travel advice found on the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office website.
PrescientTraveller is part of the intelligence group PrescientEdge that was founded in 2008. It leverages SAP HANA with a mix of technologies showcasing the SAP Hana ability to integrate with other technologies as required. Within SAP HANA PrescientTravellers uses the in memory database for real time linguistics and geo spatial analysis.
International travel involves employees interacting with diverse cultures, complex and sometimes risky situations. PrescientTraveller delivers a number of services ranging from informational and basic support at the essential level to a premium service that also includes extraction services. Using SAP HANA PrescientTraveller are able to bring together a number of different data feeds and deliver location awareness and analyse multiple data sets.
Mike Bishop, chief systems architect for PrescientTraveler explains further: “We rely on our decades of expertise in high-stakes intelligence operations, irregular warfare and threat analysis to keep international travelers safe.
“To deliver this service to millions of users, we selected the SAP HANA platform because of its unique ability to perform sentiment analysis and entity extraction on high volumes of social media and news articles to provide the advanced geospatial analysis that allows us to identify and immediately alert subscribers who are in proximity of a dangerous situation.”
What this means is that with the knowledge of a potential flashpoint in a specific location extracted from news feeds or even Social media PrescientTraveler can inform its client employees of the appropriate action to take. This might include staying in a specific location rather than travelling.
Can Geolocation for your company
SAP also announced that SAP HANA has been certified with the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), this will allow it to transfer data with other third-party data solutions. One example of this is ArcGIS, a mapping company that delivers solutions including analytics against mapping data. SAP HANA is now supported as an enterprise geodatabase for ArcGIS. ESRI, the company behind ArcGIS are also looking to develop the partnership with SAP to develop further integrations with their product portfolio to deliver business solutions across the whole SAP portfolio.
These capabilities will no doubt be delivered from the HANA Cloud Platform. HANA Cloud Integrate will provide the glue between the ArcGIS cloud based solution and the SAP applications, be they on-premises or in the cloud. It will be interesting to see what use cases develop over the next few months and which industries can benefit most from such solutions. ArcGIS have already developed solutions for airports, shopping centres and even charities such as the Canal and River trust. It will be interesting to see what SAP can deliver and where businesses can deliver significant bottom line improvements using this technology.
Improvements in the latest release include reverse geocoding. This enables an organisation to identify and utilise the longitude and latitude to identify specific locations within a certain radius. For example should a factory fire occur with risks such as a toxic cloud, it would be relatively easy to identify nearby residential locations that are at an increased risk of associated healthcare or additional disaster issues that need to be considered.
The latest release of SAP HANA delivers enhanced text analytics, such as the ability to identify relationships among the elements of a sentence and improved language support for text-mining algorithms to help organizations gain greater insight from unstructured content. New spatial features such as clustering and the ability to partition spatial data help accelerate analysis and enrich location intelligence.
Conclusion
This is one of several client announcements that SAP has announced at the SAP HANA Forum in Frankfurt, Germany and the SAP Spotlight Tour in New York. SAP HANA is finding increasing traction with clients as they look to improve their SAP solutions with the in-memory database as a first step on the journey into the SAP cloud.
A recent Americas’ SAP Users’ Group (ASUG) survey showed that SAP HANA projects are increasingly popular amongst the user base (1253 replied to the survey) and if these reach production SAP will maintain the steady growth in revenues seen in their last results.
Kevin Reilly, ASUG’s SAP S/4HANA Community Advocate, commenting in the survey report said: “The survey shows a definite trend among ASUG members on increasing HANA adoption, and I fully expect that to continue.
“The high percentage of successful SAP HANA implementations is likely a result of two factors: delivering SAP HANA on an appliance, plus the full-court press of support from SAP to ensure positive results.”
That this is not a move to the cloud for clients is interesting, there is still a reticence in companies not to move their data into the cloud. SAP continues to support both routes and while it has been able to demonstrate progress in its on-premises solutions its cloud solution will become richer and ready for those complex multinationals to deploy when they and SAP are ready.
