Austrian Retail Giant SPAR Chooses SAP HANA Infrastructure From Hitachi Data Systems and Imtech to Better Service Customers and Stay Ahead of the Competition

SANTA CLARA, CA--(Marketwired - Jul 1, 2014) - Hitachi Data Systems Corporation (HDS), a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (TSE: 6501), today announces that SPAR Austria Group has chosen Hitachi Unified Compute Platform (UCP) as the heart of its strategic SAP HANA initiative that the company hopes will power its future success and expansion in the retail industry. After significant planning and research, SPAR Information & Communication Services (ICS), together with long-term strategic partner Imtech ICT Austria, chose to migrate its SAP Business Warehouse (BW) infrastructure to Hitachi Data Systems technology.

"SPAR is moving away from being mainly an Austrian retail company to becoming a central European retail group. This change gives IT an even greater strategic importance in the success of the business. Using real-time data analytics with SAP HANA, we're able to stay competitive by making quicker business decisions and ultimately by providing better service to our customers," said Andreas Kranabitl, managing director at SPAR ICS GmbH. "Thanks to Hitachi Data Systems and Imtech, we are able to scale our SAP HANA landscape, and the Hitachi Unified Compute Platform solution gives us the high performance we need to support our future vision as a group."

The solution from Hitachi Data Systems and Imtech was selected by SPAR ICS primarily due to the scalability of Hitachi Unified Compute Platform (UCP) for the SAP HANA Platform. This datacenter class solution not only delivers maximum performance, scalability and availability for SPAR Austria Group, but also the advanced SAP HANA technology on an integrated and optimized converged platform. The solution matches the high performance requirements SPAR Austria Group needs in order to improve its business processes and increase its competitiveness.

The UCP for SAP HANA that SPAR deployed includes two Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) systems and two enterprise-class Hitachi Compute Blade servers. On top of the technology excellence, the rapid implementation capability, outstanding level of professionalism and optimal price/performance ratio all stood out for SPAR during its decision making process. These attributes were important for SPAR when they chose Hitachi Data Systems and Imtech as the ideal providers for the new converged solution. HDS and Imtech together created a powerful foundation for SAP HANA with over 150TB of capacity and plans for significant future growth.