SAP: Will Technology Renew the Company?
December 6, 2010
My view: Nope.
Bloomberg’s “SAP’s Hana Speeds the Database Race” describes in a quite accepting way talk from Oracle’s chief technical officer about “technology renewing Oracle.”
The Johnny Appleseed product is a big honking appliance that is chock full of RAM. The idea is to put lots of data in memory and get outputs really fast. Now I have heard this type of claim before. You will want to read the article and make up your own mind. Just don’t forget to ask about the cost of the appliance. My code words for really expensive, as you may know, is “big honking.”
Here’s an interesting passage from the Bloomberg, let’s believe everything a big company tells us story:
Users can run calculations from computers that include Apple’s (AAPL) iPad and see tables and charts containing their data, fed over the Internet, from servers running SAP programs. “You can process a staggering number of records and get transformational kinds of results,” says Jim Shepherd, an analyst at Gartner (IT). “An analysis that might have taken 30 minutes with conventional technology you can now do in seconds, or sub seconds. It changes the whole character of the decision-making process.”
There you have it. The truth delivered from a mid tier consulting firm. When I read the passage, I glanced at the nearest mountain to see if there were a consultant with two iPads containing the “truth”. The mountain did not seem to have either consultants or iPads. Make up your own mind about these pronouncements, please.
Several observations:
- Big data is a big problem and throwing hardware at engineering developed with 1950 traffic planning in mind won’t do the job in my experience.
- Appliances are becoming a problem. Each is different, so there are management costs involved. These big honkers are not toasters. Think headcount and the need for redundancy.
- Access to big data is not going to be improved as long as the traditional query methods are used. The future, in my opinion, is a search type of interface. In case you have not been in touch with planet earth’s business intelligence community for a while, these folks are not embracing hard core programming the way their kids are adopting their smartphones.
To wrap up: SAP’s problems have everything to do with technology and its associated costs. SAP is a company I like to monitor because it has that old IBM DNA, and it is a management case study in action. The firm flips from multi year deployments to messy legal hassles to up and down pricing, to appliances.
Maybe you dig this? Certainly the mid tier consulting firms chow down on these assertions the way I do when someone in Harrod’s Creek throws me a crust of bread. I am not so sure that the clients will as willing as they have in the past, however.
Here’s an interesting statement from the Bloomberg write up:
SAP has been quicker to deliver compelling technology and more open to customers’ needs since the management change this year, says Thorsten Poetter, a vice-president at Bayer responsible for data analysis. “SAP wasn’t very open to listening to what we said. That has changed dramatically.” The first version of Hana still requires too much extra work to load financial information from Bayer’s databases, and the company is waiting for an improvement next year that speeds the process, Poetter says. Bayer may use Hana to give its salespeople more current information as they head into customer meetings. “The general performance of a business intelligence system can’t be fast enough,” says Poetter. “I always compare it to Google. It has to be as fast as typing.”
Hmmm. Does this mean not ready for prime time even though a mid tier consultant says the gizmo is ready to roll? I will go with the Bayer view for now. Mid tier = marketing? A hypothesis.
Stephen E Arnold, December 6, 2010
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