Irfan Khan, senior vice president and chief technology officer (CTO), Database and Technology, SAP and former CTO of Sybase, spoke to Eleanor Reader about the opportunities SAP’s complete database portfolio presents for customers to create a strategy to utilise big and unstructured data.
ISAP: There has been a lot of hype about HANA recently but SAP’s database offering also includes the Sybase database products. How do the different solutions in this area fit together?
Irfan Khan: SAP acquired Sybase to drive mobility and be the leader in SAP’s pursuit of mobility in the market. The database technologies of Sybase were a value-add and a bonus.
Sybase is an underpinning to all things real-time by virtue of HANA being real-time. There is a whole host of use cases [which can be accessed] by adding Sybase technology, particularly technologies like Sybase IQ which is very much complementary to HANA, where you can utilise IQ as a point solution or for BW installations running on top of HANA. So Sybase and SAP technologies are coming together under the banner of what we refer to as the SAP Real-Time Data Platform (RTDP).
ISAP: How do you see the database products evolving in the future and how will this position SAP compared to its competitors?
IK: We have a substantial install base that will provide great levels of innovation and product enhancements to their environment. Where we see the value of this collective set of technologies coming together and then being able to compete in the market is by making real-time platforms available to customers en masse.
If you compare that with the competition, what they tend to do is drive into a very monolithic and extremely closed platform. It doesn’t really give customers a lot of choice in terms of what they deploy their hardware or software on, or the openness of the platform that they can choose. So SAP’s view is really to provide a platform that’s very comprehensive.
ISAP: What are the most innovative use cases you are seeing across the database space at the moment?
IK: We’re working with Stanford University on trying to help diagnose the treatment for a patient that’s suffering from cancer. Imagine once you have been given the extremely bad news that you may be suffering from cancer, you have to go through a whole host of tests that typically take anything between six to nine weeks. So the use case specifically in the space of medicine is to use HANA to dramatically increase the analysis that you are able to do in a short period of time.
In some instances, when you look at testing for particular variations of cancer, we can run 600 times faster certain tests. That will result in HANA being used to guarantee that you will be able to get treatment hopefully much sooner.
ISAP: What particular challenges for organisations does that proliferation of unstructured data present?
IK: The biggest challenge is how to harvest insights from unstructured data. Studies carried out by Gartner talk about a 650 per cent rise in unstructured data in the next two to three years. We have to be able to have a substantial capability to deal with that massive influx of data, and I don’t think a lot of customers are quite prepared, because they have been using traditional and kind of existing technologies to deal with unstructured data. You have to open up the innovation opportunities entirely because a lot of companies are accruing a lot of data.
ISAP: Do organisations need people with different skills to truly take advantage of the potential presented by big data?
IK: The skill-set is really the biggest challenge that we have to deal with. One key area that we are focusing on is really putting big data processing in the hands of the general public or general business by utilising well-known and interesting skills like SQL. You’ve got to provide a way of abstracting the complexity that big data represents. So having a single platform, which is really what SAP HANA is, that allows you to [use] big data in terms of transactions, in terms of analytics, in terms of predictive in a single platform, and perhaps even sentiment analysis if you choose to do that, is a significant advancement.
ISAP: How can organisations take advantage of more business users having access to analytics and big data?
IK: If businesses want to become much more analytically focused, there are two key things they need to do – provide much more self-service, so customers can actually start doing things and business users can start doing things for themselves without having to go to IT; and allow them to do things without being inhibited, so they are not stopped from asking certain questions, because that’s really not going to give them the outcome that they want anyway.
ISAP: Do companies need to stop thinking about just a database and instead think about an enterprise technology platform?
IK: If customers buy into a broader technology vision and are prepared to make investments in either training or in terms of mindshare, then they will gain a lot more value from more of a end-to-end type of platform.
