Pho­to Cred­it: SAP

SAP co-founder and chair­man of the super­vi­so­ry board, Dr. Has­so Plat­tner, needs no introduction.

“Anoth­er year, anoth­er SAP­PHIRE, anoth­er keynote — oh, you know [sigh], it’s get­ting hard­er every year,” joked Dr. Has­so in his open­ing address. His keynote began to a packed house, with atten­dees spilling out­side the the­ater for stand­ing-room-only view­ing. A hush fell over the nor­mal­ly ener­getic show floor, as peo­ple qui­et­ly cir­cled around every booth with mon­i­tors broad­cast­ing his ses­sion. Even in an envi­ron­ment designed to dis­tract, the crowd was ful­ly engaged with Dr. Hasso’s every word.

If you haven’t heard him speak before, Dr. Hasso’s deliv­ery is dry, slight­ly irrev­er­ent, and won­der­ful­ly to the point. His can­did approach and hon­esty in terms of where SAP needs to improve tends toward the unpre­dictable, but it’s always valu­able and as tech­ni­cal roadmap dis­cus­sions go, it’s good fun.

The Evo­lu­tion of HANA

Dur­ing his open­ing address at SAP­PHIRE NOW 2018, Dr. Has­so spent some time talk­ing about the pro­gres­sion of SAP’s data­bas­es over the years. He referred to SAP R1, R2, and R3 (with R3 being the biggest suc­cess) and explained how these have led to the devel­op­ment of SAP HANA.

“The hope I had in our ear­ly pro­to­types for SAP HANA and the work we did with Vishal [Sik­ka] final­ly became a real­i­ty,” said Dr. Hasso.

Pho­to Cred­it: SAP

Say Good­bye to Pre-Aggregation 

Dr. Has­so explained that the speed of SAP HANA and its in-mem­o­ry capa­bil­i­ty allows its users to avoid all the pre-aggre­ga­tion of data that used to slow things down and ham­per per­for­mance. There are no redun­dant aggre­ga­tors any­more. Dr. Has­so stat­ed that he is ​“almost sur­prised” that the com­pe­ti­tion didn’t attempt to emu­late what SAP has developed.

“We are out of the woods in terms of per­for­mance. There are so many tes­ti­mo­ni­als from SAP cus­tomers who are so pro­duc­tive with SAP HANA. These com­pa­nies can build any kind of infor­ma­tion hier­ar­chy with­out chang­ing their data. We removed a lot of redun­dant code that might have been used in the past and that means the sys­tem is more sim­ple — and so much more sta­ble,” said Dr. Hasso. 

The Key to the Intel­li­gent Enterprise

SAP HANA is now deployed by 22,000 cus­tomers. Dr. Has­so stat­ed that even the peo­ple who were skep­ti­cal about what SAP HANA could do have start­ed to believe there’s a rea­son why peo­ple would move off a great data­base like Ora­cle. Now they under­stand why, sug­gest­ed Dr. Hasso. 

With SAP HANA, users can com­plete their instal­la­tions faster and respond to busi­ness changes based on real-time data from across the orga­ni­za­tion. And the intel­li­gent enter­prise is more than ERP: It is a busi­ness world of oth­er SAP appli­ca­tions includ­ing SAP Suc­cess­Fac­tors, SAP Hybris (now renamed under the SAP Cus­tomer Expe­ri­ence umbrel­la), SAP Con­cur, SAP Leonar­do, SAP Field­glass, and oth­er products.

SAP Inte­gra­tion: A Work in Progress 

“I don’t think I promise too much when I say, if you buy all of the SAP prod­ucts, you will indeed get a dis­count. That real­ly is how it works,” joked Has­so. ​“I talk with Bill [McDer­mott] all the time and I know he has apol­o­gized that not all the inte­gra­tion between the ele­ments in the SAP ecosys­tem are per­fect — we know that and we are work­ing on that. We are bring­ing the heads of these inter­nal brand name depart­ments togeth­er on a month­ly basis to define what kind of inter­faces are need­ed so that we can be more inte­grat­ed in the future.”

As Agile as a Startup

With­in all its busi­ness units, Dr. Has­so acknowl­edges that SAP needs to be ​“as agile as a start­up” to be suc­cess­ful. He also point­ed out that we, as users, will all have to be real­ly clever in the future to exploit the pos­si­bil­i­ties that come from intel­li­gent ana­lyt­ics and new cloud plat­forms. We don’t even know yet where we can apply all the tech­ni­cal advances SAP is build­ing into the intel­li­gent enter­prise, he suggests.

Data From A to B, Not to C

“The biggest risk fac­tor when mov­ing data from A to B is that it might end up at C. We want to keep the data where it is pro­tect­ed by the secu­ri­ty fea­tures of the orig­i­nal appli­ca­tion it resides in. Because of this, we want to be able to pow­er SAP HANA data ana­lyt­ics where the data resides,” said Dr. Has­so. SAP has also engi­neered the abil­i­ty to aggre­gate, trans­form, and now anonymize data on the fly. This anonymiza­tion fac­tor will be very impor­tant to health­care com­pa­nies, for example.

“Every­thing we do now with appli­ca­tions in and out­side the world of SAP will be done with an objec­tive to con­nect things prop­er­ly and help devel­op enhance­ments to prod­ucts with­out actu­al­ly touch­ing those [soft­ware] prod­ucts and ser­vices,” said Dr. Hasso.

Real-World Busi­ness Intel­li­gence in Real Time

Dr. Has­so wel­comed Frank Cohen to the SAP­PHIRE NOW stage as the pres­i­dent for SAP Dig­i­tal Core & Indus­try Solu­tions, to demon­strate what SAP real­ly means by the term intel­li­gent enter­prise. Cohen explained that the way we used to do the month-end clos­ing process at a com­pa­ny involves many dis­con­nect­ed tasks. A firm would typ­i­cal­ly send a spread­sheet around var­i­ous depart­ments to match prod­ucts shipped ver­sus invoic­es received.

The demo explained that SAP HANA can auto­mat­i­cal­ly process and match items through­out a firm’s inven­to­ry. Excep­tions are flagged where the sys­tem doesn’t have a high enough con­fi­dence lev­el to auto­mat­i­cal­ly process items. Although the excep­tions must be resolved by a human being, the SAP soft­ware will make smart rec­om­men­da­tions to sug­gest which goods or ser­vices should be matched with which.

SAP on the Right Track

Com­ing back to Dr. Hasso’s ref­er­ence to cus­tomers who want to buy the whole SAP ecosys­tem of appli­ca­tions, SAP has empha­sized that cus­tomers can use SAP Leonar­do to ben­e­fit from using these increas­ing­ly inte­grat­ed SAP appli­ca­tions across their business. 

“I hope we have embarked upon a road that shows you SAP has made its appli­ca­tions more intel­li­gent and that you think that SAP is on the right track,” con­clud­ed Dr. Hasso.

Dr. Hasso’s open, frank, hon­est, and can­did approach isn’t a con­trived or false­ly staged play to cre­ate con­fi­dence among SAP­PHIRE NOW atten­dees, it’s what he real­ly is. We’re already look­ing for­ward to his 2019 session.

Want to find out what went on at this year’s SAP­PHIRE NOW and ASUG Annu­al Con­fer­ence? Read our cov­er­age of day one, day two, and day three.