This year’s SAP Summit saw new announcements on the HANA platform and focused on how enterprises can gain real-time business insights By Jasmine Desai
In the midst of a transition cycle amongst Indian enterprises wherein there is heightened awareness and curiosity about analytics, the SAP forum could not have been better timed. The summit commenced with Suprakash Chaudhari, MD, Indian Subcontinent, SAP, speaking on change and simplicity and tying these with innovation.
Talking about innovation within SAP solutions, he mentioned, “SAP is the easiest system to use. We are still attempting to simplify the solution and it should be one that users like to use. It ensures success of the implementation.”
Announcing the SAP Business Suite on HANA, Anthony McMahon, Senior VP, SAP Platform APJ, mentioned that our world is at an inflection point. “People are moving to upper class and it means that there is more consumption. This inflection point forces us to rethink the future. As per Gartner, the nexus of four forces consists of big data, mobile, cloud, and social. These forces are coming together and thus, creating a perfect storm for real-time engagement,” he said.
This real-time engagement can be enhanced by SAP Business Suite running on SAP HANA, he claimed. It enables real-time application and analytics, business function libraries, and predictive analytics. There are thirty-plus solutions powered by SAP HANA, which simplifies movement and use of data. It also enables flexibility to play with the data.
McMahon gave various use-case examples of the solution. In one instance, HSE24, an online and TV commerce company, was able to personalize customer engagement in real-time through SAP CRM on HANA. In another example, Ferrero has deployed SAP ERP powered by HANA. The company is expanding in new markets and in the next five years wants to double its turnover. The future for Ferrero, according to SAP, will combine mobility with big data to transform the way company execs make decisions and manage processes. India is the fastest adopter of suites in HANA in the APAC region. Giving Avon Cycles’ example (which replaced Oracle’s solution with SAP’s), McMahon said that the company, which makes 2 million cycles annually and sells them across 85 countries, found the dashboards provided by SAP’s solution to be smarter and real-time.
According to McMahon, if enterprises want to respond in real-time to the changes in demand for higher market responsiveness, they would need to empower employees with real-time business insights. “It means connecting to machines and devices in real-time for higher customer satisfaction. Real-time database would enable predictive transaction workload all at once. Real-time business requires changing the status quo. Enterprises need to understand that advanced analytics is to be done in real-time and not in a separate archive,” he said.
Real-time insights
SAP stressed on the need for organizations to have an end-to-end approach to engage, analyze and capture data across all classes. The present challenge is how to get from data to information to real-time insight. Organizations need to address latency hot-spots across the spectrum, SAP execs averred.
The most intriguing part of the event was the focus on what it means to be a real-time business. For example, the Indian market around service and BPO changed drastically due to re-engineered model and only because of innovation. Speed only makes sense when it brings value and speed and value have to be tied together.
McMahon affirmed that in-memory computing and faster networks in data centers are going to happen. Enterprises need to be data-driven, as well as people and innovation driven. Organizations need to take real-time capabilities and link them across whole real-time platform. Monolithic software architecture is restrictive to fluidity. McMahon mentioned Colgate-Palmolive, which is now able to look at its detailed profitability analysis for the first time at a granular level. Among the other enterprises that are gaining real-time insights are Mitsui (which will use genomic DNA analysis in real-time to transform patient care) and Asian Paints (which has improved productivity by having dealer-relevant data available real-time and in just one click).
There is a constant transforming environment around us and there has been a drastic change in how we use IT. To optimize and harness the capabilities that software brings, next-gen information platforms are important. Neelam Dhawan, MD, HP India spoke about how HP and SAP are co-innovating for the future, including working on next-gen platforms and in-memory analytics.
According to Dhawan, “How to manage, understand and act timely as we are becoming impatient as consumers of IT? Can organizations do with platforms that have no high-availability?” She spoke about Superdome servers that are touted to ensure that mission-critical applications are always on. “There needs to be flexibility in terms of functionality as these are used in high-investment environments. The idea is to incorporate innovation on a daily basis. Thus, the mantras to follow here are to see signals through the noise and rethink your business,” she said.
Speaking about in-memory analytics, she mentioned that there is a certain transition journey while shifting to in-memory. Organizations are questioning if it is possible to have large chunks of data and work on it real-time. At HP Labs, engineers are working on memory resistors (memristors) and HP has also started an in-memory computing center of excellence (COE) in Chennai.
The event saw informative sessions on covering the future of the business, next-gen SAP applications, enabling change through technology across different industries.
