ORLANDO – At SAP’s SAPPHIRE NOW event here, Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) unveiled several new Hitachi Unified Compute Platform (UCP) solutions for SAP HANA. Some of these – UCP 6000 for SAP S/4HANA, UCP 6000 for SAP HANA Dynamic Tiering, and new analytics capabilities for UCP 6000 for SAP HANA – are aimed at the high end of the market. For, HDS’s VAR channel partners however, the big news is the UCP 1000 for SAP HANA, which is aimed at the entry-level part of HDS’s market.

HDS’s relationship with SAP has become much more strategic in the last several years.

“As HDS took more of a higher-value approach to converged infrastructure, SAP HANA was one of the prime choices that aligned to our enterprise customer base, and we had that footprint going back to our mainframe days,” said Peter Kriparos, Head, Strategic Alliances, at HDS Canada. “That SAP message aligned well, and we’ve been with HANA since they launched converged infrastructure solutions with partners. We were the first OEM converged HANA platform that shipped HANA with our solution.”

Kriparos said that HDS has been integrating the converged HANA infrastructure into a complete end-to-end model, and that the new announcements address the full range of the market.

“We are extending the feature set at the high end with the UCP 6000, which has our world-class dynamic tiering,” he said. “But with the UCP 1000 for SAP HANA, we are also recognizing that there is a whole untapped market – the medium enterprise – that needs the business benefits that HANA has to offer. It’s not just a large enterprise play.”

Kriparos said the UCP 1000 for SAP HANA is well-suited to the specifics of the Canadian market.

“For Canada, the UCP 1000’s market is entry to medium enterprise as well as test and development,” he said. “It’s very much a midmarket play.

The UCP 1000’s market is also a strong sweet spot for most infrastructure VARs.”

The three different flavours announced for the UCP 6000 for SAP HANA address the markets of HDS’ other key partner groups, global system integrators and cloud service providers.

“The UCP 6000 is a solution that plays well with our global service integrator partners,” Kriparos said. For cloud service providers, it gives them more solutions for as-a-service offerings.”

HDS also announced that the UCP 6000 system has been added to SAP Co-Innovation Lab to develop, test and demonstrate the reference architecture.

Kriparos said that HDS’ strategic relationship around SAP HANA will only deepen further as digital transformation leads customers to look increasingly for solutions which can help them with the cloud, Big Data analytics, and the Internet of Things.

“HANA is becoming increasingly important to us, particularly as we have shifted over the last two years from positioning solutions that are hardware led and infrastructure led to understanding and becoming more of a thought leader around where the customer can go,” Kriparos said. “That’s where the power of all the Hitachi companies comes in. On the show floor at SAPPHIRE floor today we are showcasing IoT solutions in areas as diverse as construction and predictive criminal activity. SAP HANA helps us lead with what we can do with the data and harness it and build out the right solution for a customer.”

Kriparos strongly suggested that HDS partners not presently working with SAP should consider doing so because of their ability to deepen the HDS solutions.

“As the Canadian alliance leader, I always encourage and challenge our partners to invest in new and exciting areas,” he said. “What we are asking here is for our partners to evaluate SAP as one of the strong players that will continue to be relevant to the new world of Big Data.”