The European Space Agency (ESA), has introduced the Earth Observation Analysis service which is powered by the SAP HANA platform.
The new service leverages the power of SAP HANA with ESA’s Earth observation data, especially from the Copernicus programme to get insights and predict potential future impact. It provides insight by using historic and current data.
The cloud based Earth Observation Analysis service offers a standardised interface for quick, easy consumption of detailed analytics and clusters them according to customer needs.
This information can be used by several organisations ranging from government agencies, corporations from across all industries ranging from insurance, reinsurance, mining, utilities and retail.
Organisations can use the application programming interface (API) delivered through Earth Observation Analysis service to improve business decisions.
With historical data and real-time satellite data coming in from across the world, it can be used for improving business with informed decisions taken, based on asking relevant questions.
With the insight gained through the service, the organisations can get answer by asking questions like where to place new power lines, where to build a new store or when to harvest crops.
According to SAP, its partnership with ESA can give way to new field of geospatial business applications in the future.
Several businesses can be managed in the future through space-related applications including digital farming, gas pipeline management, improved planning for smart cities. This can bring business to a competitive edge and can also create new jobs and improve people’s lives.
ESA, Earth Observation, director, Josef Aschbacher said: “The European Sentinel satellites are the largest providers of Earth observation data worldwide.
“A major challenge is to convert this fantastic data into customer-specific information. Large-scale hosted processing is the next step in order to meet this challenge, thereby bringing users to the data rather than data to the users.
“ESA will benefit from the in-memory computing power of the SAP HANA platform to make Earth observation data consumable both through the newly available Earth Observation Analysis service as well as in urban and environmental use cases or even beyond in the future.”
Reinsurance company Munich RE uses ESA satellite data while providing insurance from natural disaster to organisations.
Munich Re Geospatial Solutions head Andreas Siebert said: “Every year, wildfires affect nature, people, their homes and businesses.
“While the progress of a fire itself is hard to predict, this new service from SAP, leveraging satellite data from ESA, allows us to accurately calculate costs and risks related to wildfires and even gain insights into the future probability of wildfires. This will help us to keep costs down for our clients.”
The new service will be generally available in the first quarter of 2017 and will then be offered with a consumption-based pricing model.
