Attunity deepens SAP relationship with SAP HANA certification for enhanced Attunity Replicate

Attunity is also highlighting their new Attunity Gold Client for Data Protection for SAP environments, which is designed to satisfy the new EU GDPR ‘right to be forgotten’ compliance requirements.

Matt Hayes, Attunity’s VP of SAP Business

Attunity, which makes data integration and big data management software solutions, has announced that their Attunity Replicate solution has been ETL-certified to read from and write to SAP HANA. Replicate, which is used to accelerate data replication, ingest and streaming heterogeneous databases, data warehouses and Big Data platforms, has also been extended and optimized for SAP.

While Attunity was founded thirty years ago, their relationship with SAP is much more recent.

“In December 2013, Attunity acquired Hayes Technology Group, a Chicago-based SAP-focused consultancy,” said Matt Hayes, Attunity’s VP of SAP Business, who came to Attunity in that deal. “Before they acquired us, Attunity hadn’t done a lot around SAP. Their focus in data replication was on Oracle and SQL. However, Attunity was ahead of the game for big data and analytics for the SAP market after HANA came to market. Attunity saw early on that enterprise level replication would have an appetite for highly structured ERP data, so that was a natural place to start. They acquired us to give them a footprint in the SAP space. We brought them 275 SAP customers – a total that is over 400 now.”

Hayes said that while during their first two years in Attunity, the focus was more on revenue growth and improving technical alignment, the last last couple of years have focused on integrating the technology, which has resulted in this enhanced version of Replicate.

“This is a major upgrade of our functionality,” Hayes said. “Strategically, we did it to better align together with SAP customers – which makes us more complementary with SAP as well.”

The new Attunity Replicate for SAP HANA lets enterprises easily and securely capture and integrate relevant data in real-time – to or from SAP HANA. It makes SAP and SAP HANA data available across a wide variety of analytics platforms, and across data centers, data lakes or cloud platforms. It uses change data capture [CDC] technology to provide optimized and secure synchronization of data for analytics across SAP applications on SAP HANA or S/4HANA. This expands the value of SAP HANA by delivering support for 25 additional data sources including mainframe, relational databases, Hadoop and data warehouses.

“Attunity Gold Client has been certified for SAP since 2007, but the certification of the replication support for HANA with Replicate is significant because SAP is limited in their certification programs around HANA,” Hayes said. “They have been very deliberate about HANA certification, because there has been so much adoption of HANA going on and so much change to it. Right now, for example, the certification at the database level is limited to disaster recovery, which is sending a message to the market that SAP doesn’t want you doing anything with HANA at the database level, at least right now. So we have had to take their direction, and work very closely with them on this.”

Attunity has a hybrid go-to market model. Most of their business is direct, but they have many deep strategic partners, especially on the integrator side.

“This includes the large global SIs and also the Tier 2 SIs,” Hayes said. “Tier 2 integrators like Itelligence and Secure-24 who are focused on SAP relationships  are critical for us. This kind of partner can carve SAP data out for divestiture if company divests a business, and almost all that business comes to us through our channel.”

This kind of certification from SAP is especially critical for partners,” Hayes added.

“Customers look for alignment with SAP, and technical certification shows this. It really helps partners to check the box, feel comfortable and validate things for the customer.”

Attunity is also highlighting their recent announcement of a new solution, the Attunity Gold Client for Data Protection solution, designed to assist companies with General Data Protection Regulation [GDPR] compliance in SAP environments. The solution helps to identify and mask the personally identifiable information of customers, vendors, employees and partners across production SAP ECC applications to address the “right to be forgotten” mandate.

“With our Gold Client software, we always had the capability of protecting against compliance risks,” Hayes said. “With this, we have extended that capability and functionality, so we can safely scramble and obfuscate data in an SAP production system. That will address the right to be forgotten, which is the new element that this solution specifically addresses.”

Attunity Replicate is available now. It is being demonstrated this week at the 2018 SAPPHIRE NOW at Attunity booth #1407. Attunity Gold Client for Data Protection is also available now.