Kurt J. Bilafer, Regional Vice President of Analytics, SAP, Asia Pacific and Japan, discusses with Jasmine Desai, concerns around big data and its management, data visualization and challenges faced by SAP in the market. Excerpts…
What are the major concerns around big data apart from governance and privacy?
Big data does not mean velocity or variety but thinking about problems in data differently. The challenge is that organizations still think that the most important data comes from within their organization. The challenge with the external data sets is that they are not governed. Another challenge is around quality in data management. A lot of data gets generated from lot of sophisticated devices that people use on a day to day basis. Can all this information be collected? How do you normalize the data to make it useful? The major hurdle would also be to integrate back-end with that information. The challenge is the data sets whether they are public data sets or you re creating of your own, there is no governance around it.
Should all data issues be treated as big data problem? How can organizations make out that they are having big data or information management problem?
Every company knows they have this problem, but the problem is that no one wants to solve it, because it is a expensive challenge and how to measure ROI. The real challenge is how to collect it, how to store and how to use it. They focus on quality of data when they have to give it to senior executives. That is when it is all cleansed. When there is bad data in real-time the decisions can be catastrophic. Organizations identify big data opportunities when they look at how competitive the marketplace is. The big shift that we are seeing is that business users are trying to solve this.
What is SAP doing on data visualization front?
It is the next wave in analytics. We have launched a new product called Lumira. That is our new visualization tool. It takes all the data from Business Object (BO) and outside data and create mash-ups. Business users can do this on their desktop on an excel like interface. Once they create this data-set they can publish it back to the enterprise for all BO users to use. We are trying to help organizations to understand that the most valuable data is not the data that comes from the transactional systems. Business users look at anomalies, that is, red stops and ask how can they fix that. They do not want all information, they just want it to be put simply into a visual format.
Will HANA replace Business Warehouse (BW)?
The plan right now is for both of them to co-exist. BW will continue to be this logical semantic layer that has all these relationships, whether or not BW is their physical data store. Why we need both of them is because not all data needs to be real-time. Lot of transactional data you need to have but not in-memory. It will be mock data. Hard data is what is sitting on HANA. Both of them will come together to help customers who have made lot of investments in BW and still want to do, but want to it be more performing so they will have BW sitting on HANA. And there will be other customers who would want whole suite. They will continue to stay separate, but we will continue to stay flexible on what HANA supports. Not all our customers will go to HANA, so we make it more flexible. Right now, one does not have to use the entire suite.
What is your big challenge with HANA at present?
Our big challenge is to make understand non-SAP customers the value of our solutions. Its a market issue wherein customers think that HANA is meant only for SAP customers. The ones who have purchased HANA do not want to talk about it openly because it is their competitive differentiator. Most interesting use-cases of HANA comes from non-SAP customer. For example, McLaren uses HANA and BO to track information of cars on the racetrack. There is no ERP information. It is information about temperature on tires etc. They look at it in real-time and tell the crew when the cars should hit. It is a use-case of a non-SAP customer. The problems of organizations are unique and different and we are trying to launch specific analytic solution on top of HANA like fraud analytics.
Cloud based buying is on a rise. Do you see this resonating at SAP as well?
We are seeing the same trend in cloud as well. The challenge with cloud is broadband as it is not the same everywhere in India. In such scenario, cloud is not the right solution. There are purpose built applications that truly reside on cloud like Salesforce. Other applications need to be a choice. Some organizations want to be more strategic and innovative, they want to outsource legacy applications to cloud.
