A great way to summarize day 1 of Sapphire 2011(#sapphirenow) is in revising equation of Einstein to e=mc(imc)2 where
m = Mobility
c = Cloud
imc = In Memory computing
There were some really interesting discussions today, some of the key takeaways:
The day started with an interesting almost theatrical speech by Gabriel Byrne. It was a pretty interesting from a content perspective. This was followed up by pretty nice “big think” panel discussion with a select group of futurists, with some interesting takeaways.
- Mobility will quadruple the number of people on the internet
- New Demographics are changing the business map of the world - There is an aging population in the US, EU , China & Japan with countries like Brazil, India getting a significant demographic dividend (large / increasing working age population)
- What were previously developing markets have been transformed into emerging countries, but imagine a future where they become developed countries.
- Your cellphone today has more computing capacity than all that NASA had in the 1960's when they put a man on the moon
- Transformation of economies, Commodity Capitalism - To brand capitalism - To intellectual capitalism . Intellectual Capitalism is the future.
- Today small groups/individuals have huge power, they can now do what was possible only by governments before.
- Imagine how the world will change when a billion new minds come online
- Never confuse a clear vision/view with a short distance
- Technology Vision is only one part of equation, the business model definition is more important to make the vision a reality
- Revenue to employee ratio in industries is going to seriously change in the future.
The next one i attended was a session by Monsanto titled Integrating SAP BusinessObjects Solutions into Your SAP Software Landscape, Some key takeaways from the session:
- They wanted more simplicity and a centralized, scalable, fault-tolerant, single tool set with a broad spectrum of functionality. - They went with business Objects. Implemented enterprise wide "business objects" which goes against Sap / BW and other systems
- Business Warehouse / BEX wasn't very usable
- Business warehouse accelerator was a huge win for Monsanto - this changed the tide of user expectation/perception
- They eliminated 1000's of reports nobody complained
- IT focused on key reports and for the others users were given the capabilities
- Eliminated 5-6 tools , good saving in the regions
- Accuracy and stability of production environments is a key, need to find the right balance between rigidity and agility
- Don't under estimate the explosion of self service / plan for rapid adoption - To address the self service need they went to BOE
- Another lesson learned was the need to staff for ramp up / new technologies
- Focus on Infrastructure / centralization / optimization
- Organization structuring for BI is important - governance / maintenance
- Tiers of data - what's the most important data for the organization - focus on that to move to a data driven decision model
- HANA is very high on their radar
- Whatever we do on business objects needs to be agonistic to underlying systems
Key takeaways from a session on Analytics with George Mathew:
- Analytics revenue to SAP is around a Billion $ , Which is a growth 17-18%
- What's driving this demand - Post downturn push to understand business better
- A demo of SAP Mobile BI App, which gives native tablet/smartphone experience for BI. With the ability to directly access existing / already built dashboards etc (re-use). this includes offline capability
- BOE Adoption - First week of publishing 5000 apps were download in a month its up to 10k. Over 200000 downloads 18 months - Driving more a prosumer experience
- EPM 10 provides offline capability along with write ability write back
- They need to a better job with SME's
- In the future we can expect to see HANA powered BW (Business Warehouse)
- This is going to be the year of operational BI
- SAP wont buy Qlikview
- Thinking about how to approach semi replicated / offline (data) functionality on mobile devices - High on CIO's agenda.
Prashanth Rai
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