SAP Launches New Edition Of Its Vora Big Data Software, Expands Cloud Deployment Options For Partners

SAP is delivering a new release of its Vora big data analytics software that supports multi-cloud deployments, providing partners and customers with more flexibility when migrating between on-premise, cloud and hybrid deployments.

The new release of Vora incorporates container technology, leveraging open-source Kubernetes to deliver Vora as a container to simplify deployment and cluster management on public cloud infrastructure systems.

"Partners want to be able to deploy Vora on multiple cloud systems. This expands the range of deployment models for partners," said Amit Satoor, SAP senior director of product and solution marketing.

[Related: SAP: Cloud Software, Services To Generate Up To 75 Percent Of Revenue By 2020 ]

The company also said the live customer cloud service on the SAP Data Network, the company's hosted data-as-a-service offering that launched earlier this year, can now tap into Vora's distributed computing capabilities to analyze customer data.

The live customer cloud service on the SAP Data Network combines data from SAP customer systems with business analytics and machine learning capabilities.

And SAP said it plans to add support to Vora for Microsoft's Azure Data Lake system, hosted in Microsoft's Azure public cloud, by the end of the year. Vora is already available on the Amazon Web Services Marketplace and can load and distribute data files stored in the AWS Simple Storage Service (S3).

Vora, launched in September 2015, is SAP's entry in the market for software that speeds up the processing of huge volumes of data for business analytics tasks. Based on the open-source Apache Spark engine, Vora taps into data within Hadoop ecosystems, as well as transactional data systems such as SAP's own HANA platform.

Vora customers have always had the option of deploying the software on-premise or in the cloud. But Satoor said the 2.0 edition takes the software a step more toward the cloud, recognition that more businesses and organizations are moving their big data workloads to the cloud for increased flexibility and scalability.

Satoor said the goal is to make Vora available on all public cloud systems, eventually adding the Google Cloud Platform to the list of supported cloud platforms. That could also bring more AWS, Azure and Google partners into the SAP partner ecosystem.

"We are bringing together data transformation and business transformation on the same platform, uniting structured data and computed unstructured data to change the way businesses plan, scale and innovate," said Greg McStravick, president of SAP database and data management, in a statement.