I spent yesterday getting to Las Vegas for SAP TechEd && d-code and missed last night’s keynote with Steve Lucas, but up this morning to watch Björn Goerke — head of SAP Product & Innovation Technology — give the morning keynote on putting new technology into action. With the increasing rate of digital disruption, it’s imperative to embrace new ways of doing business, or risk becoming obsolete; this requires taking advantage of big data and real-time analytics as well as modern platforms. SAP’s current catch phrase is “Run Simple”, based in part on the idea of “one truth”, that is, one place for all your data so that you have a real-time view of your business rather than relying on separate sources for operations and analytics. You can’t run — and respond — at the speed that business requires if your analytics are based on yesterday’s transactions.
SAP HANA — their in-memory data store — allows for real-time analytics directly on operational transaction data, events, IoT machine data, social media data and more, all in a single data store. With the release of SAP HANA SPS09, they are adding support for dynamic tiering, streaming, enterprise information management, graphing, Hadoop user-defined functions, and multi-tenancy; these improve the management capabilities as well as the functionality. SAP deploys all of their business software solutions on HANA (although some more traditional databases are still supported in some products) with the goal to providing the basis for the “one truth” within business data.
Goerke was joined on stage by a representative from Alliander, an energy distribution company based in the Netherlands, and he demonstrated a HANA-based analytical dashboard based on geographic data that reduces the time required for geospatial queries — such as filtering by pipelines that are within a certain distance from buildings — from hours using more traditional database technology, to seconds with HANA. Geospatial data is one of the areas where in-memory data and analytics can really make a difference in terms of performance; I did a lot of my early-career software development on geospatial data, and there are some tough problems here that are not easily addressed by more traditional tools.
Another part of the simplicity message is “one experience” via the SAPUI5-based Fiori, providing for a more unified experienced between desktop and mobile, including management and distribution of mobile apps. They’ve added offline capabilities for their mobile apps – a capability widely ignored or dismissed as “unimportant” by developers who live and work only in areas blanketed in 4G and WiFi coverage, but critical in many real-world applications. Goerke demonstrated using some of the application development services — with some “help” from Ian Kimbell — to define an API, use it to create a mobile app, deploy it to a company app store, then install and run it: not something that most executives do live on stage at a keynote.
SAP now has a number of partnerships with hardware and infrastructure vendors to optimize their gear for SAP and especially for HANA: last week we saw an announcement about SAP running on the IBM cloud, and today we heard about how sgi is taking their well-known computational hardware capabilities and applying them to running transactional platforms such as SAP. SAP has also partnered with small software development shops to deliver the innovations in HANA-based applications needed to drive this forward. Applications developed on HANA can run on premise or in SAP’s managed cloud (and now IBM’s managed cloud), where they manage HANA and the SAP applications including Business Suite and Business Warehouse. Through a number of strategic acquisitions, SAP has much more than just your ERP and financials, however: they offer solutions for HR management, procurement, e-commerce, customer engagement and more. They also offer a rich set of development tools and application services for software development unrelated to SAP applications, allowing for applications built and deployed on HANA with modern mobile user interfaces and collaboration. In keeping with Goerke’s Star Trek theme in the keynote, very Borg-like. 🙂
Lots more here than I could possibly capture; you can watch the keynotes and other presentations online at SAP TechEd online.