Hexagon’s Geospatial division has launched M.App Enterprise 2021, a significant update to its platform for creating geospatial and location intelligence applications. The latest release features new browser-based 3D capabilities and enhanced visual effects, plus the ability to create and configure custom applications more easily.
M.App Enterprise 2021 adds complete and seamless integration with Hexagon’s LuciadRIA. Now, users can access LuciadRIA’s 3D features, including support for panoramic imagery, shading, ambient occlusion and other visualization effects, to build browser-based solutions with no development necessary.
The latest version also features a new browser app configurator that makes it even easier to create spatio-temporal dashboards, known as Smart M.Apps. Additionally, Feature Analyzer has been expanded to allow users to add and manage multiple datasets on the fly and set up workflows. These enhancements enable more dynamic configurations, allowing field workers to be alerted quickly when action is required.
The city of Klagenfurt, Austria — a long-time Hexagon customer — has already begun using M.App Enterprise 2021 to create a city app platform that features a detailed 3D urban landscape of the entire city.
“This opens up endless possibilities for applications to automate several manual processes within different departments of the city,” said Günter Koren, head of the department of surveying and GIS at the city of Klagenfurt. “We believe M. App Enterprise will be an essential step in our journey to become a smarter, safer city for our 100,000 citizens.”
The latest release contains other new features and improvements, including an overhauled style editor, a new default dark theme, options for customized theming and full support for SAP HANA databases.
“M.App Enterprise 2021 helps organizations achieve smart monitoring of their cities, infrastructure and services by seamlessly incorporating location intelligence into enterprise systems and workflows,” said Georg Hammerer, chief technology officer of Hexagon’s Geospatial division. “With augmented visuals and dynamic configurations, this new version of M.App Enterprise can help customers easily set up powerful applications, allowing them to be more productive and efficient.”
Esri’s ArcGIS software is being integrated into SAP’s latest cloud-based offering, SAP HANA spatial services, to help customers create location-aware business applications faster, according to spatial analytics company Esri.
Based on SAP Cloud Platform, the new offering enables businesses to process location data such as complex imagery, as well as visualize and analyze their authoritative data in a geospatial context.
The new geo-enabled solution from SAP will allow users to deliver their data through consumer-friendly maps and integrate the results into custom business applications, the company said. Customers using SAP software will also be able to create custom models that efficiently process streams of Earth observation data such as water content or soil temperatures and see this data on high-quality basemaps provided by Esri’s ArcGIS Online.
Most business objectives — such as increasing revenue growth, reducing operational costs or improving customer service — rely on some sort of location data. Unfortunately, many executives lack an accurate and up-to-date understanding of where performance is going well and where improvements need to be made.
This new offering from SAP, which leverages Esri technology, lets organizations extract high-value business information from satellite, drone and open data sources and then easily discover and share location-based insights.
“As an SAP global technology partner, we are very excited about this offering, as it demonstrates that SAP and Esri products work better together,” said Chris Cappelli, director of strategic business development at Esri. “Users of SAP HANA spatial services can now achieve native integration of spatial and enterprise data across all business processes. By putting the power of location information into the hands of key stakeholders, businesses can make better-informed decisions with their own data.”
The integration follows SAP’s announcement on Jan. 24 that Esri supports SAP HANA as an enterprise geodatabase with the release of ArcGIS 10.6 and ArcGIS Pro 2.1.
Esri and SAP customers can benefit from enhanced performance and scalability as well as full integration of both enterprise and spatial data. Both Esri and SAP continue to deliver new innovations that help lower total cost of ownership and administration costs brought on by the tight integration of IT and geospatial landscapes, Esri said.
Esri will showcase its new integration of location intelligence technology with SAP HANA spatial services at SAPPHIRE NOW and ASUG Annual Conference in booth #1239.
Hexagon Geospatial has released a GeoMedia data server for SAP HANA, enabling enterprise business and geographic information system (GIS) users to run spatial and non-spatial business applications and processes within the SAP HANA platform.
Developed by Hexagon Safety & Infrastructure with support from SAP, the native integration between Hexagon’s GeoMedia and SAP HANA coordinates data and processes across different SAP HANA platforms, helping improve accuracy, reliability and efficiency, which can reduce costs and errors.
The new data server pushes down query and analysis of spatial and business data directly into SAP HANA, enabling direct read/write access at the object and feature level. Through the integration, users can perform spatial queries and advanced analytics, manage spatial relationships and visualize the results for industry-specific uses, providing new opportunities for operational reporting, predictive analytics and more to benefit their businesses.
The commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) integration is designed to be faster, easier to implement and more sustainable than integrations built with custom commands and web services. Hexagon joins a growing list of GIS vendors that integrate their offerings natively with SAP HANA.
This integration leverages GeoMedia from the Producer Suite in Hexagon Geospatial’s Power Portfolio of desktop, web and mobile geospatial applications and Hexagon Safety & Infrastructure’s industry-specific applications for utilities, telecommunications, transportation, public works and other functions.
“Today, many businesses recognize the vital need to incorporate geospatial information into their decision-making processes,” said Mladen Stojic, Hexagon Geospatial president. “By combining our geospatial acumen with the high-performance, advanced data processing and enterprise readiness of SAP HANA, we can support customers in harnessing the flood of information provided by spatial data and help give them the power and flexibility they need to make smart, timely and ultimately, profitable decisions.”
“Our customers want to develop much closer coordination and integration between spatial and non-spatial business systems to streamline work processes, enable automation and gain greater insight,” said Maximilian Weber, senior vice president, EMEA, Hexagon Safety & Infrastructure. “This integration between Hexagon and SAP HANA supports our strategic direction to more closely integrate our solutions within our customers’ wider enterprise information architectures.”
This release of ArcGIS, planned for 2016, expands the existing native integration with SAP HANA and allows customers to run SAP Business Suite and ArcGIS applications within an architecture based on SAP HANA. The companies said they will further enhance the SAP HANA platform by more deeply integrating advanced ArcGIS geospatial capabilities and content across SAP’s broader application portfolio.
The collaboration between SAP and Esri is expected to provide the ability to run both GIS workloads and advanced spatial analytics on a single SAP HANA geodatabase. The companies stated that customers will be able to apply sophisticated business rules and relationships to spatial data directly in SAP HANA, define advanced georelational models such as topologies and networks, and permit both GIS and enterprise business users to work within the same multiuser access and editing environment.
“We’re very excited about the enterprise geodatabase support for SAP HANA,” said Jack Dangermond, Esri’s president. “It will bring our customers speed, simplicity and better integration with their enterprise information. For SAP customers, it delivers a complete platform for mapping and geospatial intelligence. By synchronizing our platforms, our respective customers will benefit across the enterprise. We’re doing the work to make sure that GIS and mapping is available to all — not just traditional mapping experts.”
SAP and Esri have been technology partners for a number of years, providing integration of their respective platforms, SAP HANA and Esri ArcGIS. Companies invested in Esri and SAP can immediately create maps populated with data from SAP HANA and instantly access those maps anywhere on any ArcGIS client, as well as in SAP or custom applications. Today users of SAP HANA can access ArcGIS for geospatial data and geoservices and perform analytics, while Esri users can similarly access, analyze and query both spatial and nonspatial data directly in SAP HANA. Esri supports deployments of SAP HANA with query layers and features services for customers that want to dramatically increase spatial query performance by running SAP HANA side by side with ArcGIS.
“Our customers represent a new generation of data stewards requiring an in-memory computing platform that performs at scales unseen before — including large-scale geography,” said Daniel Schneiss, senior vice president and global head, SAP HANA Platform and Databases, SAP. “As we enter a world of exponential data growth and the Internet of Things, the need to geospatially analyze Big Data will only increase from this point forward. We look forward to teaming with Esri to address this need by integrating the full power of ArcGIS technology with SAP HANA.”
SAP SE is offering new capabilities to turbocharge spatial intelligence by simplifying, accelerating and geo-enabling access to enterprise data.
In the era of the Internet of Things (IoT), proliferation of low-cost location-aware devices is augmenting enterprise data with the “where” component. The SAP HANA platform can help break the silos between enterprise and GIS systems, enabling companies to get more value from corporate data and uncover trends and patterns in a visually intuitive manner, the company said in a statement.
The announcement was made at the Esri User Conference (Esri UC) being held July 21–23 in San Diego.
Accelerating Spatial Processing for Real-Time Insights. The latest release of SAP HANA further enhances in-memory spatial processing capabilities to deliver faster responses for millions of data points, the company said. SAP HANA SPS10 brings new spatial features and enhancements, such as support for multidimensional geometries and on-the-fly spatial coordinate transformations, driven by customer innovation projects such as flight operations for Lufthansa Systems.
Case Study: Lufthansa
Lufthansa Systems is using the spatial capabilities in SAP HANA for tracking global flight operations. Changes in airport, meteorological and fleet data are monitored in real time and used to reroute flight trajectories in split seconds while optimizing fuel and crew costs. Lufthansa Systems believes that this innovative technology for dispatching, monitoring and visualizing air traffic by providing instant insights and real-time decision support will help change the face of its business.
“Together with SAP, we built a prototype of a future operational database for commercial flight support,” said Christoph Krüger, lead architect, Lufthansa Systems. “The spatial engine in SAP HANA has given us the ability to track thousands of flights per day on a rich 3D mapping interface that includes both spatial and temporal coordinates. At the same time, we were able to uncover breakthrough application scenarios that would not have been possible without the SAP HANA platform.”
Deeper Integration of SAP HANA and Esri
In addition to the existing read-only query layer integration to SAP HANA released by Esri in 2014, ArcGIS for Desktop now supports feature services providing a method for users to create, read, update or delete spatial data directly in SAP HANA. This simplifies the access and use of spatial data in SAP HANA and provides powerful, transactional spatial data creation and editing capabilities to support real-time operational and analytic applications, opening a broad new range of use cases and workflows for both Esri and SAP users.
The State of Indiana uses SAP HANA, SAP Lumira software and SAP Predictive Analytics software in combination with Esri for geo-spatial analytics to help ensure safer roads and traffic conditions and improve the lives of its citizens.
“Our long-standing technical co-innovation with SAP has taken a major step forward with the introduction of the SAP HANA platform and its spatial capabilities,” said Jack Dangermond, founder and president of Esri. “We now have a single platform from SAP that simplifies both integration and the deployment of mapping and spatial analysis across the entire SAP application landscape.”
Analytics Solutions from SAP Enhanced by Partner Extensions
The native integration between Esri ArcGIS and data visualization software from SAP, SAP Lumira, provides new capabilities for customers. It includes a rich library of charts and visualizations, overlay charts with geo-spatial data for location-based insight, support to visualize multiple layers of business data on top of Esri base maps and support to embed and create custom extensions with software development kits (SDKs). SAP partners such as Galigeo use these SDKs to extend the value of analytics solutions from SAP with new options for visualizing and analyzing information in SAP Lumira and SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio using Esri cloud and on-premise resources. A free version of SAP Lumira is currently available for download.
Geo-Enablement of SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA
SAP is delivering geospatial enablement of SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA software with a geo-enabling services offering. Geo-enabling allows SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA to store spatial data directly on SAP HANA instead of on a third-party database, resulting in faster response times and a simpler architecture.
Spatial Enhancements in SAP Work Manager
The SAP Work Manager mobile app has added Esri feature layer integration and offline mapping capabilities. These improve user interaction on mobile devices and enable mobile technicians servicing clients in the field to access their maps and associated information without Internet connectivity.
For more information, visit the SAP News Center. Follow SAP on Twitter at @sapnews, or view the video below for a demonstration from the 2015 Esri UC.
