I am sitting among the SAP influencers at SAP SapphireNow, all excited about what we have been waiting for this week and that’s the keynote featuring executive board member Vishal Sikka and SAP Founder Dr. Hasso Plattner.
It’s a time to reflect on the network. Millions of people are online with data growing exponentially. But the latency issue is not going away. It’s actually getting worse. We talk about always being online but it’s clear offline access will be increasingly important. That issue in itself drives demand for in-memory technology. It’s Ground Hog day all over again. As Forrester’s Paul Hammerman just tweeted: “Expecting detailed discussion of in-memory computing as the future for analytics, transactions and cloud apps from Hasso.”
Let’s get started.
9:01 a.m. EST: The crowd is moving into the main tent.
9:14 a.m. EST: Lights just dimmed. Emcees are taking the stage. Vishal Sikka is taking the stage.
9:16 a.m.: No matter how great the innovation it can not disrupt the client’s work. Sikka is talking in context to SAP HANA, the in-memory technology.
9:21 a.m.: HANA revolutionized how SAP manages data. They were able to process 460 billion lines of data in far less time. It made SAP re-think its application development. Sikka calls it a once in a lifetime opportunity. Sikka is calling up a Colgate executive to thank him for HANA who calls the technology a game changer. After Colgate proved it worked, the company did a test in Mexico, one of its largest markets. Sales people are able to run sales reports hundreds of times faster.
9:27 a.m.: Bosch case study is about financial analysis and how customers feel about the product. They can change products and add new ones. Things that once took days now takes seconds. A Caterpillar executive is talking about the analytics that can be turned around in seconds. A Russia oil company challenged SAP to analyze oil production all over the world. The company drills and transports oil using huge amounts of resources. Working in real-time to manage resources, there is a new opportunity to see and use the data.
9:35 a.m.: How do you see real-time views with a worldwide operation? The challenge with Nestle was to accelerate to near real-time so users could see data in a 2,000 time performance improvement.
9:38 a.m.: We”re now talking about real-time analytics and how NRI, a Japanese company is using it to do real-time tracking of traffic data. SAP Hana allowed the company to take 360 million lines of data and process it to optimize taxi routes.
9:41 a.m.: A consortium of companies is owned by Canoe Ventures that is developing interactive advertising for television. Real-time analytics are critical for analyzing the advertising and providing the results.
9:43 a.m.: Infosys, one of the largest IT consulting companies in the world, to do margin management. Infosys leverages HANA to simulate margins in a top down fashion. The results seem to hold a lot of promise that is not constrained by data challenges.
9:46 a.m.: SAP worked with Intel and its Xeon E-7 family of processors. Standard high volume server has four terabytes of memory. SAP HANA has ten cores. That’s a powerful machine!
9:53 a.m.: In-memory technology will allow Cisco customers to do real-time analysis. They are able to drill down from 700 million lines of data.
9:56 a.m.: Openness and optimizing acros layers has to be tempered with consolidating existing legacy layers. That means rethinking existing applications and creating new ones.
9:59 a.m.: Application bult natively on HANA is able to drill down to level of individual employee. T-Mobile used HANa to do real-time reporting with 66 million lines of data in seconds versus days.
10:08 a.m.: The way applications are built can be simplified. To enable the new reality requires openness. Why then are legacy systems that are closed? SAP started working on SAP Netwever Gateway. It was designed to be open for developers. SAP’s partners at Adobe are working with HANA to combat piracy. Data can be analyzed and combined with financial information and other factors to reduce piracy.
10:14 a.m. Microsoft and SAP are teaming to provide a gateway development kit for .NET developers to raise level of integration between companies.
10:17 a.m.: The future of the cloud is an in-memory cloud, Sikka says. Example: Google instant search. This can be called the RAM cloud.
10:23 a.m.: We’re seeing a demo of the HANA Cloud with MediData. The pre-beta of SAP HANA AppCloud is now available from SAP.
10:30 a.m.: Hasso Plattner is on stage, telling jokes. What a leader he is. He is responding to questions from customers. “Why is SAP investing in HANA?” Plattner is talking about the evolution of SAP Business Suite and why it needed to be transformed. The suite can shrink when the data is consolidated on HANA. It is the biggest investment by SAP in the last ten years.
10:37 a.m.: SAP HANA is a project that simplifies more than adding complexity. That’s a big change for SAP.
10:39 a.m.: The pieces of software have to be fairly independent. Seems like a loosely coupled approach.
10:41a.m.:Hardware is extremely attractive. Plattner is holding up an Apple MiniMac that can run HANA. It has two CPUs with four cores – a company can run on that.
10:43 a.m.: SAP HANA gets closer to IBM Watson. At a co-location facility in California we are seeing a live feed of a data center running HANA on 1600 cores. Shows how HANA can be scaled. We are seeing how the architecture works and its redundancy.
10:49 a.m.: Can anyone be as fast as we are?, Plattner asked. No,Plattner says. He made a veiled reference to Oracle and how HANA is a clear winner. “Cheers, Oracle!,” Plattner said.
10:53 a.m.: SAP HANA runs Map/Reduce for distributed parallel computing.
10:55 a.m. Plattner calls HANA similar tp punch card systems that also did not aggregate data.
11:03 a.m.: What new apps are possible? Interactive analytics, mobile applications, planning applications, text and unstructured applications are all possible.
11:12 a.m.: Seeing ATP (available to promise) examples that show real-time inventories.
11:20 a.m. Going to wrap this up. We’ll be back soon.
