SAP has combined its Hana product with the European Space Agency to enable an earth observation analysis service. Photo: SAP

[Via Satellite 11-09-2016] SAP, in cooperation with the European Space Agency (ESA), has launched its Earth Observation Analysis service, a cloud service powered by the SAP Hana platform. The two organizations have been working together since early this year with the aim to facilitate access to a new field of business opportunities in the geospatial context by combining the power of SAP Hana with ESA’s Earth observation data, especially from the Copernicus program.

“Every year, wildfires affect nature, people, their homes and businesses,” said Andreas Siebert, head of geospatial solutions at Munich Re, a company using the Earth Observation Analysis service for gaining insights and predicting potential future impact from historic and current data. “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.”

The Earth Observation Analysis service provides a standardized interface of detailed analytics. Government agencies and companies active in all industries, from insurance and reinsurance to mill products, mining, utilities and retail, can leverage the Application Programming Interface (API) delivered through the Earth Observation Analysis service. SAP plans to make the service generally available in the first quarter of 2017.