TEC: PROS to Embed SAP HANA with Its Big Data Sales App
April 25, 2013-
By P.J. Jakovljevic
For a long time, PROS Inc. was a prominent pricing management software provider for both business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) industries. Lately, however, the vendor has been leveraging its decades-long experience in handling large volumes of data to provide big data applications for sales effectiveness (pricing being only a part thereof). In other words, PROS now delivers prescriptive analytics and data science to help customers identify sales opportunities, develop offers, and set prices.
PROS has announced that it has signed an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) agreement with SAP to embed the SAP HANA platform with its big data apps. SAP HANA is a real-time in-memory database platform that streamlines analytics, planning, predictive, and sentiment assessments to allow business to operate in real time.
SAP and PROS have had an interesting (maybe even tricky) relationship, given that SAP has a very close reseller relationship with PROS’ fierce competitor Vendavo. Yet, more than half of PROS B2B pricing customers run SAP solutions, and PROS has had to invest in its partnership with SAP to provide customers with cohesive solutions for their SAP environments. PROS is an SAP software solution and technology partner in the SAP PartnerEdge program, and a participant in the SAP EcoHub solutions marketplace. Since 2009, PROS solutions have achieved SAP-certified integration with SAP solutions, including the flagship PROS Pricing Solution Suite (PPSS).
In addition to strong pricing optimization, analytics, and execution capabilities, the depth of integration of PROS solutions with SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) and SAP customer relationship management (CRM) applications is a key reason why customers choose PROS. The SAP HANA OEM agreement is a natural extension of PROS’ long-term partnership with SAP. On the other hand, SAP gets an important endorsement by PROS, which has long been a close Microsoft technology partner as well.
As an OEM partner, the planned integration with SAP HANA is expected to offer PROS customers additional flexibility, speed, and data science capabilities for optimizing pricing and sales. The first generally available integrated products should come later this year on the PPSS suite.