Mexico City, January 13, 2014.- In order to improve the management of high volumes of data, Grupo Merza, a retailer group with operations in 27 Mexican states through 146 supermarkets and 17 wholesale stores, has deployed SAP HANA on Cisco UCS® servers in their national network.

Grupo Merza recently completed a 90-day implementation of the SAP Sales Analysis for Retail Analytic Rapid Deployment Solution, powered by SAP HANA in memory computing platform. The solution delivers prebuilt data models, key performance indicators (KPIs), role-specific web/mobile dashboards and reports to provide retailers with real-time understanding of marketing, merchandising and store operations. Using SAP HANA on Cisco UCS, Grupo Merza has reduced the time to process the information reports by 70% and 40% of the transactional system through a Data Center environment.

Grupo Merza, one of the largest retail companies in Mexico, started operations in 1948 and is focused on the distribution and marketing of groceries, with over 4,500 employees in their companies: Merza; Mega Merza, Abarrotes Lagunitas, Cava del Duero and Super Covi.

SAP HANA is a platform for real-time analytics and applications that enable an organization to analyze business operations based on large volumes and a variety of detailed data in real time, as that data is collected.

Cisco UCS delivers innovative data center architecture with computing, network, storage access, and virtualization resources integrated in a single cohesive system that reduces total overall cost, simplifies management, and increases data center agility.

Cisco UCS and SAP HANA architecture is a flexible, multipurpose, data-source-independent, in-memory platform that combines SAP software components optimized for Cisco UCS. Cisco Nexus® networking provides low latency and high bandwidth communication between SAP HANA nodes, allowing it to scale transparently as data needs grow, especially for data-intensive workloads.

The simplicity of the Cisco UCS converged infrastructure solution also reduces complexity and eases management, resulting in a lower total cost of ownership. Thus, Cisco UCS for SAP HANA allows customers to experience benefits – real-time data analytics and data warehousing – in seconds instead of hours, while laying the foundation to run SAP’s other core enterprise applications on SAP HANA in the future.

Supporting Quotes

Grupo Merza

“For us, one of our crucial goals is to be close to our customers and offer them the best service. In order to reach it, Grupo Merza chose SAP HANA on Cisco UCS that will place us in the technological forefront to take decisions promptly based on the data collected that will reflect the response to our clients.”

Ramon Alvarez, Country Manager at SAP Mexico

“In a rapidly changing world, businesses need a real-time platform to power new experiences, with actionable insights and simplified operations to beat their competition. We are very pleased with the results of the implementation of Grupo Merza; SAP HANA is a revolutionary platform that will allow them to optimize their processes and make better decisions faster.”

Rogelio Velasco, Vice President of Cisco México

“Nowadays it is strategically important to deliver real-time business intelligence. Through SAP HANA and Cisco UCS servers, Grupo Merza will be able to manage information in a reliable, flexible and scalable network while reducing operational costs and enhancing application performance.”

The deployment of the infrastructure was done with the support of NOVIS, SAP partner.

Cisco UCS Facts

Since it was first introduced five years ago, Cisco UCS has become highly successful with companies because it delivers superior customer benefits.

Cisco UCS achievements since 2009:

• 28,000 Cisco UCS customers worldwide
• No. 2 world market share by revenue in x86 blade servers
• Over 3,850 Cisco UCS channel partners
• Ten of thousands of supported applications
• 82 world record performance benchmarks to date
• More than 75% of all Fortune 500 customers have invested in Cisco UCS.

About Grupo Merza

100% Mexican Company with more than 65 years in the market. Grupo Merza has 146 supermarkets and 17 wholesale stores covering 27 states of Mexico. http://www.grupomerza.com

About SAP

As market leader in enterprise application software, SAP (NYSE: SAP) helps companies of all sizes and industries run better. From back office to boardroom, warehouse to storefront, desktop to mobile device – SAP empowers people and organizations to work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively to stay ahead of the competition. SAP applications and services enable more than 251,000 customers to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and grow sustainably. For more information, visit www.sap.com.

About Cisco

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