Dr Vishal Sikka visited Australia for the first time last month to deliver a keynote presentation at the SAP Forum Australia.
The renowned architect behind SAP HANA and member of the Executive Board of SAP AG and the Global Managing Board, heading technology and innovation, gave an enigmatic and down-to-earth presentation, as one might expect from the man instrumental in the intellectual renewal of SAP over the last five years.
A key focus of his presentation was the relationship between design and mathematics, and how they have been utilised to create SAP HANA.
“I see that in a very phenomenal way the age that we are entering is being shaped by the combination of these two things,” Sikka said.
“We have lived with the limitations of software systems – what they enable us to do and what they constrain and constrict. I believe that, in particular with HANA, we now have the ability to overcome those limitations and achieve this idea of being able to make, efficiently, all those important decisions in a certain window of opportunity.”
While Sikka delved into the technical aspects of this and explored the concept of Design Thinking, he did also provide the latest updates on SAP HANA’s expanding footprint.
He was most proud to share the results of SAP’s own internal CRM system implementation now runs on HANA live.
“We just finished the quarter on the back of my little girl HANA,” he said. “SAP, as you might image, is a 14.5 billion euro company with 40,000 users for CRM. When the quarter closed, we had 10,000 parallel users.”
SAP has also just released geographic information system (GIS) capabilities on HANA, according to Sikka. Timelines are another piece of functionality proving particularly useful.
“Instead of the insert-only character of HANA, we can now do timelines. So you can reconstruct histories and timelines of what happened on the fly. And it is thousands of times faster then any other database,” he said.
Sikka also reiterated that HANA is “by far” the fastest growing product in the company’s history.
Referring to a recent article by an analyst that stated SAP was discounting other revenues to make HANA seem more popular, Sikka hit back by saying the theory was “highly irresponsible and nonsensical”.
With more than 1200 SAP HANA customers globally – more than half of which are live, more than 310 videos on the HANA Academy, and 530 instances of HANA running on Amazon Web Services, Sikka said the product has gained a huge momentum that won’t be slowing down any time soon.
Its capacity also continues to grow, with Sikka stating that HANA would be able to run 500 terabytes of data by the time Sapphire NOW, which takes place on 14-16 May 2013, is held.
