Irene Hopf, consulting architect and IBM SAP global alliance leader for analytics and SAP HANA, based at the IBM International SAP Competency Centre in Waldorf, Germany, visited Australia earlier this year. Together with Stuart Dickinson, CEO of Oxygen Business Solutions, she gave her views on how customers are making the case for investing in SAP HANA.
ISAP: Do you see SAP HANA as a strategic opportunity for better engagement with clients?
Stuart Dickinson: We see that HANA really as the next wave. What are organisations looking for today? It’s about faster decision-making, getting business value or business insight to people who need it so they can make those decisions. In the contact centres and in the field, they have traditionally been quite data constrained in terms of getting the information out there and allowing them to have those conversations. What we see HANA doing is unlocking the secrets that are sitting in the corporate repository of information and making this information available for people to turn it into better customer conversations.
The analytics and speeding up reporting is very interesting, but to me I see the real opportunity is to move SAP in the long term from the system of record to a much more dynamic platform where it becomes the system of engagement – it becomes an opportunity for people to have real conversations and leverage that.
From an integrator’s perspective, it’s about being able to demonstrate value much faster because we don’t have to go through this whole process of putting in an ERP and reporting system. It’s about getting data in there quickly, getting insight out quickly, so we can demonstrate value to the customer in real time.
ISAP: Does that make the investment decision quicker?
SD: It is a big investment. The investment will get cheaper over time as the technology gets cheaper and the consulting gets more packaged. I think the investment decision can be more grounded in fact because you can do a proof of value fast, demonstrate that value, and that can result in a business case, whereas often decision-making around ERPs and business warehouses will be longer term, whereas what we are seeing globally is a lot of clients who are doing these proof of concepts can see real value almost within months. So the business case in some ways becomes a lot easier to do.
Irene Hopf: The decision for SAP HANA, if a customer identifies the business scenario where it would be an advantage, will be different for every single customer. SAP HANA is not predominantly designed for a specific industry or for a specific size, but rather it’s across everything. I agree that we can demonstrate value easier, due to the fact that in established database-based SAP systems, you’re working off different data sets or databases in the sense of the foundation layout for the transaction and analytical systems. To bring that eventually back together again will provide enormous value, because then you are working off one data foundation again. From a vision point of view, that is very appealing to a lot of customers. What I have seen so far for those customers who adopted the technology and went into proof of concept projects, many of them didn’t even create a business case, they just trust SAP or they like the idea. What happens with business users is they say, if I could get that result in five seconds, I can do all kinds of different variations of those analyses. In fact we can make other business decisions than we were able to before, because sometimes, in classic systems you would probably shoot off a query and then it takes hours before you get a result back, or a query would time out because the system is not capable of running it, and then you don’t need the result any more or it’s out of date.
On the other hand, we see a concern of our customers not only on the business side, but on the IT side. You need to have the systems in the standard service management environment and integrate it. So in terms of things like scalability, high availability, back-up restore, set-ups of dual data centres, for example, all this needs to be maturely covered. We have good solutions there and good approaches, but due to the fact that SAP HANA is a very young product, concepts are still evolving.
ISAP: For customers who have adopted HANA, what is the best way to successfully get that value out of HANA quickly?
IH: From an infrastructure perspective, we have had tremendous success around the world with a powerful infrastructure solution for SAP HANA where we have specific components in the appliance. There is a specific file system in there which is coming out of the high performance computing area, called General Parallel File System (GPFS), and that is the ‘secret sauce’ for built-in high availability and scalability on a building block basis. That is a game-changer, especially if customers need highly available systems, if SAP HANA is used in a business critical system.
SD: The key for us is understanding that it’s not about just making things go faster. It’s about being really clear around why in a business value chain you might want to make something go faster, because you can push a decision closer to the customer, you can make a better commercial decision. Once you’re clear about that, the technology can unlock that process. For example, in a customer call centre, could you make that experience with the customer more interactive and rich, so if you unlock data around that particular customer that was previously locked up, you can create real transparency for the people who are trying to make these decisions to help customer get value and a good relationship with the organisation. Be smart about it, start in one place and then look to expand it over time. Pick a business process and say this process would benefit from acceleration, and be clear around that.
ISAP: Are customers sceptical about the ‘HANA hype’, or are they becoming believers in the technology itself?
IH: Some of them are doubtful. But there are also customers who are clearly early adopters and are running after the next new technology wave. It can be a complete game-changer for a company, and we have those use cases, where they either use SAP HANA as an accelerator to an existing Business Suite system or as the DB under SAP Business Warehouse. It’s also dependent on what region you are in. Certainly there are countries which are more conservative and countries which are more ready to adopt. However the conversation needs to be justified from a business perspective.
SD: I think it’s a concept that changes the sceptics to believers very quickly when they see something happen in real time. So it demonstrates well, and when you see it used in real business scenarios, you can take the logical leap and say, ‘within my business, how could I use that to make my business run better?’.
IH: Crucial though is that customers want to see it with their own data. They don’t want to see a generic demonstration.
ISAP If you’re seeing decisions driven by business rather than IT, does that make for a different engagement model from a consulting perspective?
SD: Generally in the market what’s happening today is that a lot of businesses are making more line of business-based software solution decisions.
IH: With the effective improvement of the usage of IT solutions in companies, the business functions and the IT department need to come together more closely. Especially for companies that are very successful, it’s mandatory that they work together. Business functions and the IT department need to work hand in hand, and if they have close cooperation within the enterprise, it’s one secret to the success of improving business results.
ISAP: Where do you see the future for HANA?
SD: For the last 10 years we have been talking about this concept of a real-time enterprise, and this is another step in the journey, taking us closer to that. I just see that accelerating – we can make real decisions in business supported by factual data and ask questions of that data on an ongoing basis. That to me is incredibly powerful and existing, because it’s where we really start to unlock some of this corporate knowledge that’s being captured in these systems, and use that in truly meaningful ways.
IH: I would expect the focus of SAP HANA to stay for quite a while on the analytical side. I have customers who are investing into SAP HANA not for reasons of speed, but for data consistency, because they have many systems which contain certain data, and that data is reflected in different formats in different systems. If they bring that into one system and have the analysis running from that one system, that is going to make a big difference for those businesses.
This article was originally published in Inside SAP Summer edition 2012.
