- written by Uwe Bohnhorst, Chief Operating Officer, itelligence AG -
The great issue of Hasso Plattner’s and Vishal Sikka’s keynote on the final day of the SAPPHIRE NOW was the following one: By how many minutes would those two exceed their speech? This time by 35 minutes, leading to the fact that unfortunately I was not able to witness the end of the speech since I had to attend a customer meeting.
Hasso Plattner touched on different myths and truths about his “baby“ and favorite subject SAP HANA. There were rumors in the press that HANA was incapable of this and that, this was something he wanted to clear up. HANA is incapable of being virtualized? Of course, it is possible. All the data has to be saved in the main drive? Not true. It is still stored in a conventional database in a tabular form via physical data media or SSD; HANA only dynamically loads the columns of the tables queried by the user. Cache mechanisms and the benefits of compression algorithms came up: Is it possible to transfer a 3-terabyte database into a HANA-DB and to easily reduce it to 1.5 or 2 terabytes? No one else is better qualified to answer questions of that nature on HANA than Hasso Plattner. Read more…
- written by Uwe Bohnhorst, Chief Operating Officer, itelligence AG -
On the second day of the SAPPHIRE NOW, Jim Hagemann Snabe rose to speak. In his keynote the Co-CEO drew parallels between nature and modern business, since in his opinion the cornerstone of the Darwinian theory of evolution – natural selection – applies to both of them. SAP software, in particular SAP HANA, offers survival support in highly competitive markets from which only the powerful survive. For example the bolides from McLaren…
According to Jim Hagemann Snabe the new HANA strategy of SAP comprises three areas – called run, optimize and innovate. The subject “run“ deals with the support of modern processes. The full availability of the SAP Business Suite on HANA – including all industrial solutions and all trade-specific functions (currently still exclusing the utilities, Telco and Media industries) was officially announced. 100 customers are already in the ramp-up with the Suite on HANA (SoH), therewith SAP all in all has already approx. 1,500 HANA customers, with 250 thereof already being live.
As of now, customers can find the Suite on HANA on the SAP price list as an official product and can stand out from competition: Because they have an in-memory database helping them to considerably accelerate a variety of processes and enable e.g. Predictive Analytics – analyses which combine OLAP and OLTP data in one system and enable them in real-time.
Under the heading “optimize“ SAP will shortly launch a whole slew of generic HANA apps based on the in-memory database. Among the functionalities announced for example is an optimized month-end closing or simulation opportunity which, due to technical restrictions with regard to performance, seemed impossible up to now.
The third column “innovate“ is defined by SAP as customer or partner-specific extensions developed based on HANA. Thus, customers may (have) further develop(ed) their respective system according to their taste and therewith provide themselves competitive edges. This is how innovative or also completely new business models are supported via in-memory technology. Partners such as itelligence are in demand here: We have a profound know-how of the sector, many innovative, existing customers are therefore in the position to implement our expertise in specific solutions for the respective customer. So SAP provides the platform, while the business partner arranges the innovation – i.e. individualization – at and with the customer. We already have the first ideas and inquiries for this in hand.
Background information
Thanks to the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, SAP will leave the customer free to choose in the future: He may operate his Business Suite by himself or have it hosted by SAP via the cloud, with the latter promising a substantially faster added value at lower total costs. The new Managed Cloud was announced almost one week ago, on the SAPPHIRE NOW, SAP has already received 60 inquiries. Analysts assume that in a just a few years there will be more business applications running in the cloud than on-premise. This year, SAP intends to double its cloud sales to almost one billion Euros, at present almost 29 million users benefit from SAP software in the cloud. However, that is mainly from users of Jam, SAP’s Social Media Software, which is now automatically delivered with every product.
Based on pithy show cases, SAP today illustrated the optimization potential, at PepsiCo for example some 60,000 of the overall 260,000 employees are paid salaries and wages via the cloud. In the business division B2B Nespresso introduced CRM onDemand within six weeks and thereby also internally submitted evidence that SAP does not only stand for speed and faster added value on strategy documents.
“Empower People“ is the third strategic piece of news of the day. In the future, SAP will benchmark itself with regard to user friendliness by means of consumer software such as Google, Facebook or Apple-apps. In this context SAP Fiori was announced – a collection of (at present) 25 different apps providing an intuitive user experience for frequently used software functions. The applications can be used by HTML5-supporting browsers both from a desktop as well as from mobile devices. To this end Fiori uses the approach of the Responsive Design: A website or application is processed to such an extent to automatically adapt to the user interface of the end device.
Speaking of mobile devices: My mobile phone is hinting it is time to leave, the next meeting is starting. Amid spring-like temperatures we are going to go back to the hotel now by shuttle bus, over 31 are booked up by guests of the SAPPHIRE NOW. Check back tomorrow for more news of the SAPPHIRE NOW.
- written by Uwe Bohnhorst, Chief Operating Officer, itelligence AG -
The core business of the company SAP AG and its partners is still generated in the fields of SAP ERP and SAP Business Suite. However, the SAPPHIRE NOW clearly shows that the market is changing. The topics of the future are Cloud, Mobile and of course SAP HANA.
After all, during the first quarter of this year, 55 per cent of the new customers in the channel have already decided in favor of the SAP Business Suite on HANA (or at least the option), SAP is positioning itself accordingly during its customer and partner conference in Orlando. For the existing partner ecosystem this development represents a clear challenge, it is important to build up expertise and know-how and not just to sell the new solution but also to understand it to be able to implement it for the customers. During the Partner Summit on the vigil of the SAPPHIRE NOW, Eric Duffaut, President Global Ecosystem & Channels of SAP AG, clearly addressed the partners: “You are our number one partners now, but you will have to defend your position. The ecosystem is changing, It is also up to you to adapt to this change and join us on our journey“. Duffaut‘s no questions asked demand: “Invest, build up the appropriate know-how – we need you“. Read more…
May 14, 2013
“On day one of SAPPHIRE, itelligence was presented with an RDS qualification plaque from SAP. itelligence is the first SAP Partner qualified to deploy the GRC Access Control RDS. What a great way to kick off the week!” – Laure Poquette, Director of Marketing itelligence U.S.
May 13, 2013
Leading up to the SAPPHIRE NOW + ASUG Conference this week, the U.S. itelligence team has posted a blog about the value of rapid deployment solutions. Check it out here on the itell-u-what blog! And don’t forget to follow them on twitter @itelligence_us.
May 10, 2013
With the 2013 SAPPHIRE NOW + ASUG Conference days away, we want to share a blog post from our U.S. team. Check out their latest post on the Official itelligence U.S. blog – i-tell-u-what!
Our corporate vision “We deliver powerful SAP solutions to the world” sounds rather impressive, don’t you agree? But what, exactly, does it really mean? In our latest video we focussed on two “power themes” – on one hand the power of our solutions. On the other hand our video especially shows the power of emotions.
These only are two facets of “Power” itelligence stands for. The video also shows the:
- Power of innovation
- Power of experience
- Power of success
- Power of solutions
And now: Please enjoy watching “The Power of itelligence” – ghe video
- written by Klaus-Christoph Mueller, Director Global Business Solutions, itelligence -
How easily can a user solve his management tasks with current IT systems? A simple question – but it leads to a quite complex answer if you take a closer look at it. As management deals with structuring, I have split this to three different Blog posts that I have written about this topic. In part 1 I concentrated on the challenges which managers (from my point of view this includes everyone who has to manage tasks in his or her job and private life) have to face. Part 2 of my Blog series focused on the answer to following question: Why are such tasks in general very poorly reflected in current IT systems? And in part three I will try to answer following question:
Will this situation go on forever? Read more…
- written by Klaus-Christoph Mueller, Director Global Business Solutions, itelligence -
In part 1 of my Blog series I wrote about the circumstance that all of us are managers in some way. And a manager has to do everything at once and ASAP while this fact is very poorly reflected in current IT systems.
What are the two main reasons for this?
Up to now, technology and systems simply were not ready for this! Since the beginning of the computer age, capacity in storage and memory was scarce or at least expensive and hence basically never available in desired quantity. Remember Moore´s Law, IT price-performance rate is doubling every 18 months and this rule has proven constant over quite a number of years already. Read more…
