posted on 3/10/2011 10:45:34 AM
The enterprise software leader says it will inject powerful business intelligence throughout its portfolio via in-memory tools, and ticks off the applications that it will introduce in the third and fourth quarters.
Enterprise applications juggernaut SAP is making strides in driving business intelligence capabilities into diverse business processes, announcing this week that it will leverage its in-memory computing technology in a welter of new and updated applications.
At an unveiling in Boston on Wednesday, SAP officials expanded on their previous vow to use the company’s HANA in-memory technology to increase the business intelligence capabilities of its entire portfolio of applications, including Business Suite, its SaaS product Business ByDesign, its mid-market products Business One and All-in-One, and its Business Objects business intelligence offering.
In the latter half of this year, SAP will roll out a slew of new and updated applications that use in-memory technology to run near-real-time analytics on millions, sometimes billions of transaction records and deliver business intelligence from the mass of data, officials said at the Boston event. The applications that will debut in the third quarter are Sales and Operations Planning and Cash and Liquidity Management.
Rolling out in the fourth quarter will be Trade Promotion Management for consumer product goods companies; Intelligent Payment Broker for companies managing invoices across payment networks; Smart Meter Analytics and Energy Management for utilities; Profitability Engine; Customer Revenue Performance Management for granular analysis of specific customer accounts; Merchandizing and Assortment Planning for retailers; and Customer Specific Pricing for companies looking to deliver to their customers unique pricing and products, all while accounting for appropriate regulations and workflows by individual customer.
Some of the applications will be available as cloud-based offerings, SAP executive board member Vishal Sikka said during a question–and-answer session. He declined to provide details on which of the new crop would fit that profile.
On-stage, Sikka and his counterparts cited the example of a utility company that is running SAP’s HANA technology to excavate business intelligence from the smart meters it has placed on customers’ homes. Previously, the analysis on 1.8 billion meter readings had taken the company more than two days to run. With SAP’s in-memory technology, Sikka said the process took four seconds.
In-memory technology facilitates real-time business intelligence by parsing real-time and historical data into a computer system’s memory, essentially creating a cache that can be accessed and analyzed more quickly than data that must be retrieved from disparate enterprise systems or parsed by a data warehouse, officials said. The new and updated applications SAP will introduce will help business users explore and act on big data, in SAP’s words.
“You are not limited in what kinds of questions you can ask,” Sikka told attendees in Boston.
The company has already introduced its first HANA-based BI application, Strategic Workforce Planning, and has begun to add in-memory capabilities to Business ByDesign.
According to Sikka, the HANA in-memory technology will allow the company to offer new options to the 15,000 customers of its Business Warehouse business intelligence platform. HANA, he said, could replace the databases running beneath Business Warehouse. Later this year, HANA will become the foundation for Business Warehouse deployments. And at “some point in the future,” Sikka told attendees, SAP will run its ERP catchall, Business Suite, on HANA.
That kind of alternative points up the innovation that in-memory technology delivers to business intelligence processes, he said, but also underscores the technology’s ability to simplify the IT landscape.
“Very rarely,” Sikka said, “there is a technology paradigm, a convergence…that dissolves away the complexities that are already there.”
And yet, Sikka conceded that in-memory technology itself won’t be the differentiator for SAP. “This is an advantage that any technology company can get to. Only SAP can marry it with a deep understanding of applications,” he said. “Every product in SAP will be transformed by this.”