SAPPHIRE NOW’s Most Memorable First

By Rory Doherty
Editorial Director, Optimal SAP Advisor

 

Many ‘firsts’ make this year’s SAPPHIRE memorable -- First 100 days for new SAP co-CEOs McDermott and Snabe; first simultaneous Frankfurt/Orlando real-time on-demand broadcast of SAPPHIRE; and with 5,000 attendees in Frankfurt, 10,500 in Orlando and 35,000 tuning in via the Web, SAPPHIRE NOW ranks first among all SAPPHIREs in number of participants. All of these firsts are noteworthy. But what is likely to emerge as perhaps the most memorable first from this year’s conference has to do with memory itself. And by this I mean the first ever real-time link between business insight, foresight and action made possible by SAP’s breakthrough in-memory software.

Announced at SAPPHIRE NOW, SAP’s new in-memory appliance, dubbed the SAP Business Analytic Engine, combines in-memory technology with a powerful calculation engine and business-centric data modeling and data management tools that enable business users to instantaneously access, explore, model and analyze transactional, analytical and Web-based data in real-time and in a single environment.

Speeding up queries leveraging in-memory technology is nothing new for SAP, dating back to SAP liveCache technology that powered the SAP Advanced Planning and Optimization (SAP APO) solution within mySAP SCM (circa 2004). In 2006, SAP introduced its Business Warehouse Accelerator, an analytic engine for NetWeaver that utilizes in-memory technology to enable very fast query processing, and at SAPPHIRE 2009, SAP announced SAP BusinessObjects Explorer, accelerated version, a solution that bundles BusinessObjects Explorer and the SAP BW Accelerator in a blade server appliance set up.

(For more on SAP’s early in-memory forays, read remarkably prescient article authored by Optimal Solutions President Sam Sliman in 2007: “Database-free SAP.”)

What makes SAP’s new in-memory offerings so special?

A confluence of many factors lends seismic significance to the new SAP in-memory database technology and SAP Business Analytic Engine appliance. Here are just a few…

Innovation without disruption

While the analytical speed made possible by an in-memory database has undeniable theoretical appeal, dickering with vital company data securely stored in data warehouses and soundly backed on disks is not something easily embraced by today’s risk-adverse business leaders.

SAP’s Hasso Plattner addressed this concern head on in his SAPPHIRE NOW keynote, asserting that inviolable tenets of  “Design Thinking” -- desirability, viability and feasibility -- guide the development of SAP’s in-memory solutions. Plattner also emphasized the importance of  “risk-free value” and “looking back to move forward.” Plattner cited tests and gave convincing assurance that SAP’s in-memory database provides huge, no-risk advantages, and will “one day eliminate the need for the traditional database.”

Enterprise mobility and the smartphone explosion

If the goal is to run business better, smarter and faster, mobility must be part of the strategy, which is why SAP has made ‘on-device’ one of its three growth pillars (on-premise and on-demand being the other two).

While enterprise mobility has been around for some time and has grown steadily over the past several years in terms of adoption, today’s smartphone explosion kicks enterprise mobility into high gear. North American smartphone shipments will exceed 65 million units in 2010, representing 38% year-over-year growth, and global smartphone volumes continued their climb in Q1 2010 as volumes reached 55.2 million, representing a 67% year-on-year, which is the highest growth rate seen since the end of 2007.

(For more on enterprise mobility and smartphone growth, read article by Optimal Solutions President Sam Sliman: The Smartphone Revolution: Coming to SAPPHIRE NOW, and Optimal SAP Blog post: Prime Drivers for SAP Mobility)

Gargantuan potential

There is really no limit to the business-value potential signified by the advances in in-memory technology and appliance development announced at SAPPHIRE NOW. This is a rich topic we will explore in future articles.

Suffice it to say that eliminating the time-, intelligence-, and productivity-sucking divide between operational, transactional and Web-based data; reducing to nanoseconds the time required for analysis, and putting this unprecedented decision-making power in the hands, literally, of business users throughout the enterprise for anywhere, anytime execution is a game-changer that requires a bit of time to fully absorb.

Without delving too deeply into Proustian particulars of remembrance, it is a safe bet that 10 years down the road the most memorable first from this year’s SAPPHIRE NOW will be the first ever real-time link between business insight, foresight and action made possible by SAP’s ground-breaking advances in risk-free in-memory technology.