By Nathan Dukes
SAP confirmed their innovation strategy at the Gartner Business Intelligence and Information Management Summit in Sydney yesterday.
One of yesterday’s key sessions was a round-table discussion with event partners SAP, HP and Oracle, who talked about their innovation strategy and what we could expect to see from them in the coming 12 months.
Vice President of Intelligence Platform Product Marketing at SAP AG, Franz Aman, said during the discussion SAP is trying to work closely with customers to produce innovation which is relevant to their audience.
“Working with customers is a key inspiration, and absolutely critical. You’ve go to be close to what’s needed, and you can’t just think of things in the ivory tower,” Aman said.
The comments are a repeat of the sentiment affirmed by SAP AG supervisory board chairman Hasso Plattner following the departure of CEO Leo Apotheker.
Plattner said at the time SAP would try to return their focus to customers and a strong innovation strategy.
“We have a small lab outfit, and they are prototyping all kinds of things. We put these out on the web on a regular basis and we get feedback,” Aman continued.
“So a lot of the innovation that were driving is dealing with real customer issues. If it’s good, and you tell us that it’s interesting, then we’ll move it into product”.
When the floor was opened to questions, one attendee asked the panel to ponder the idea of cloud and SaaS offerings replacing more traditional BI models.
Aman suggested a blended approach, offering a glimpse into an innovation strategy which draws on the benefits of both local and cloud resources.
“Today, if I want to get 100 terabytes from Sydney to New York, I can fly them their faster than I can pipe them through the internet, that’s just a fact of life,” he said.
“For that reason, I think moving massive warehouses into the cloud? Mmm…,” he said with uncertainty.
“If you have a situation where you have an in-the-cloud app, you can complement that with BI. I think it has a role to play, and we’ve seen some really interesting projects.
