In my previous blog, Welcome to the Real World,  I stressed the importance of planning for the world of real time analytics and real time decision making. Today, I would like to drill deeper into this topic in light of a couple of recent announcements from SAP.  This week is SAP’s annual SAPPHIRE NOW + ASUG conference, and these new solutions are all the talk.

SAP Business Suite Powered by HANA: SAP’s shift towards providing the Business Suite (ECC, CRM) powered by HANA is nothing short of tectonic. It co-locates both transaction and analytics in the same place, meaning the same system will be used for both recording and reporting on the data. No need to wait for the data from the transaction system (OLTP) to be batch processed and made available the next day from a Data Warehousing system (OLAP). The Analytics will be available in the ‘here and now.’ In a sense, this makes operational reporting available for one and all. That said, I am by no means suggesting that this will do away with centralized Data Warehouses and associated Analytics. There are several significant use cases for having a centralized Data Warehouse, like historical data and non-SAP data with powerful datamodels. But when it comes to operational AND real-time reporting, this shift is a big one. With the HANA Analytics foundation within the Business Suite on HANA, there are plenty of ways to slice and dice real-time data.  So real-time inventory, real-time analysis of POS information, real-time planning are all now a reality.

HANA Enterprise Cloud Shrouded in Cupertino-like secrecy, SAP recently announced the HANA Enterprise Cloud.  So what IS the Enterprise Cloud? In simple terms, this is the complete Enterprise Suite powered by HANA and deployed on SAP’s own cloud. What does it mean? It reduces the entry barrier to move to HANA, or at the very least try and understand the benefits of HANA, and the real-time analytics. Companies that want to check out the benefits of real-time reporting but are not willing to take the plunge and make significant investment in hardware can now try this ‘near zero’ infrastructure investment in a simple subscription based model. SAP gave the Enterprise Cloud project the codename NEO.

Pushing the Matrix theme further…which pill will you take?  Will you take the blue pill to remain in today’s reality of yesterday’s data?  Or, will you take the red pill and live in the real world of real-time data? We will discuss more on these developments and what it means to life sciences and consumer products companies in my next blog.