Paul Blogs on BI Archive

Puffing and Blowing the Cloud in New Orleans

By
Paul
Published: January 23, 2012Posted in: Business Intelligence, Paul Blogs on BITags: ,
Puffing and Blowing the Cloud in New Orleans

It’s 5:45 am in the morning (on Jan 17th) and I’m jogging on the spot with hundreds of other crazy people down by the riverside in central New Orleans. It’s still dark and we are about to start a 2 mile “fun” run .  While there was nothing fun about my predicament, the run has been organized by SAP to raise money for a very worthy local charity – the Tipitina’s Foundation (http://tipitinasfoundation.org/) – which supports childhood musical education and preserves New Orleans musical heritage.

The race begins and off I go huffing and puffing into the darkness. I have never been a quiet runner and when I exhale you can hear me from 50 yards away. So as I passed a local man who was still celebrating from the night before, I was not surprised when he yelled out “You be blowing like a whale!”

When I staggered across the finish line, I was blowing like a whole school of whales. I headed straight back to the hotel, showered and made my way to the SAP event I was attending.

As SAP executives presented their key initiatives and strategy for 2012, the Cloud was very prominent. While SAP has been a little behind some of the other major software vendors with its Cloud solutions, Bill McDermott, co-CEO said in a recent interview about this very point that SAP was about to ‘unleash the tiger”. So the announcement that SAP is acquiring the human resource management cloud application company SuccessFactors, for $3.4 billion (pending US government approval) is a big part of that tiger. SuccessFactors has a stated 15 million cloud users which is apparently five times more than salesforce.com.

SAP does need some help in this area because their BI cloud offering known as On Demand has not been hugely successful. I believe this is not because companies are not interested in running BI applications based on Crystal Reports, Xcelsius and Web Intelligence in the Cloud, but more to do with the poor return on investment.

Most large software vendors that have created Cloud based applications have made the implementation and annual subscription costs so high that it is difficult to show that they are truly saving money over the equivalent on-premise solution. The same software vendors have created a climate and a culture where they dramatically discount their on premise software (particularly at the end of a quarter) that the Cloud equivalent does not really save any money. This takes away the major reason why companies would choose a Cloud solution.

Unless these software giants wake up and start offering bargain basement pricing for their Cloud solutions and reinstate the most compelling reason to use them, they will lose market share to those new and up-and-coming Cloud application companies that are willing to do so. If that happens, the SAP tiger could quickly turn into a whale that will be blowing the Cloud away.

Business Intelligence 2012 Predictions

By
Paul
Published: January 16, 2012Posted in: Blog Featured, Paul Blogs on BITags: , , , , ,
Business Intelligence 2012 Predictions

While 2011 was a great year for Business Intelligence, I think that 2012 will be even greater as many new technologies that gained a foothold in 2011 become mainstream and even more exciting BI solutions emerge.

It is becoming more apparent than ever that the leading BI companies of four years ago (Business Objects, Cognos and Hyperion) having been taken over by bigger software application companies (SAP, IBM and Oracle) are losing their leadership position in BI innovation as most of their BI product development effort is focused inwardly to better integrate with their respective owners applications to take advantage of easier sales within their own customer base. They have almost become “legacy BI” solutions along with Microsoft who is quickly falling into the same category. As many industry analysts predicted at the time of these acquisitions, this has made room for new startup companies to fill the void left behind. So during these past few years , we have seen the meteoric rise of Apple with its mobile solutions, Saleforce with its phenomenal cloud based CRM application and Qliktech with its high speed, fast deployment BI solutions.

The BI landscape continues to change at an ever-accelerating pace and I am sure we will be looking at many new names, unheard of today, in a year’s time. In the meantime, here are my top 5 BI predictions for 2012 :

Prediction 1:  Mobile Business Intelligence will start to dominate over conventional business intelligence as companies will demand mobility as a compulsory feature. Mobile workforces will start to replace laptops with iPads (which will be the tablet of choice for businesses in 2012) as more useful and compelling BI solutions are developed for mobile devices. Companies like Mellmo, with Roambi (www.roambi.com), are already well positioned to take advantage of this trend but other strong competitors will emerge in the coming year as more BI dashboard solutions go mobile.

Prediction 2: Cloud based BI applications will propagate like wildfire and the race is on as to who, if anyone, will dominate this space. The question is do any of the BI vendors have the execution capability and the vision to do what Microsoft did to dominate the PC software business or Amazon did to dominate the on-line retail space – namely drop the price so low (or even free) to gain market share at the cost of profit? If not, watch out for iCloud or Google making a play for this huge BI opportunity.

Prediction 3: BI dashboards will continue to thrive but there will be more trend towards Operational BI rather than Strategic BI in 2012. As the capabilities for alerting, write back, connectivity to all types of applications (cloud, internet, on premise, mobile and machine interface) continue to expand, the possibilities and demand for operational BI with dashboard interfaces will too.

Prediction 4: “Big Data” wars will drive more demand for BI. With IBM leading the pack and SAP and Oracle not far behind, I predict a battle on an Exabyte scale as they and others compete as to who can analyze the most data in the fastest time and push it into meaningful BI solutions. The good news for businesses is that this will drive the price of BI tools down (as will the competition from Cloud and Mobile BI solutions).

Prediction 5: Business Intelligence for Web and Social Media content will be super-hot in 2012. The demand to perform BI against unstructured data sources from the web and use BI tools to analyze and visualize will go beyond conventional marketing applications and become an invaluable asset in all areas of business. (Of course, this was the prediction I did not score myself well on in 2011 so I want to go further out on the limb with it this year!).

So let’s see what happens. I am certainly pumped up and excited to see how BI will continue to evolve this year. It is a safe prediction to say that it will evolve for sure but it is usually the unpredictable direction that keeps us (especially me) on our toes. Enjoy the ride.

Looking Back on 2011 Predictions

By
Paul
Published: January 3, 2012Posted in: Blog Featured, Paul Blogs on BITags:
Looking Back on 2011 Predictions

At the beginning of 2011, I made 5 predictions in terms of Business Intelligence trends for the year and I thought it would be interesting to look back on the year and see how those predictions turned out. So here goes :

Prediction 1: Visual Dashboards will remain dominant as the BI User Interface of choice. They will expand beyond their traditional tactical and strategic usage and be seen more in operational BI applications as backend performance with in memory analytics and caching continues to improve. Tools like Xcelsius will increase their presence due to both their visual appeal and ease of use.

Well Visual Dashboards did remain dominant and they certainly did expand into operational BI areas. We saw non-traditional BI functions like “write back” become more used. Xcelsius continued to grow in popularity and usage. I think I scored a 5 out of 5 on this one!

Prediction 2: Data Governance will be a priority as both large and mid-size companies are compelled to accurately consolidate and clean up their data for more relevant and precise business intelligence. Data quality, integration and master data management solutions will become mandatory in many organizations.

Data Governance was a priority with many large companies in 2011 but not so much with mid-size organizations as they tried to navigate a very unpredictable and bumpy economy. Data quality remained important but was still often pushed down the priority list in favor of meeting deliverable deadlines. I think I can only give myself a 2 out of 5 on this one.

Prediction 3: The race for optimal mobile business intelligence solutions will get into full swing. With a plethora of new tablet devices and new BI mobile software products, I anticipate a year of experimentation and we will need to wait another year before the real market leaders are determined. Watch out for Roambi (http://www.roambi.com/) because they are definitely heading in the right direction.

Mobile BI was a big topic in 2011 and a lot of new solutions appeared, both streaming and off-line based applications. Many companies did explore and experiment and some purchased and deployed. We saw many new tablet devices appear and almost as quickly disappear. Apple’s iPad remains the business tablet device of choice while Androids are becoming the most popular mobile smart phones. Roambi increased its presence globally and just released more amazing new views (Layers and Squares) and has become the BI mobile solution to beat. I score myself a 5 out of 5 on this one!

Prediction 4: Relational database Data Marts and Warehouses will continue to be the BI repository of choice in 2011. OLAP cubes will remain a niche market and the new in memory databases are just too immature and too expensive to have a serious impact this year. There will probably be lots of hype but until this new technology is affordable to the masses, it will have minimal effect. Data Mart projects will continue to thrive in the small to medium enterprise space.

Data Marts and Warehouses still remain the BI repository of choice although many companies are looking at a quicker method to deploy their ever-increasing demand for BI analytics. SAP spent a boat load of money, resources and hype promoting their new HANA in-memory analytics solution but there are very few running in live production. As the technology evolves and becomes more commodity that may change. I score 5 out of 5 on this one.

Prediction 5: Business Intelligence for Web and Social Media content will be hot and in demand. The need to perform BI against the predominantly unstructured data sources of the web has never been greater as more business and institutions both grow their web presence and web driven marketing. BI tools and solutions that can quickly analyze this data both quantitatively and qualitatively will see fast growth and adoption in 2011.

Using BI against Web and social media content has grown in 2011 but it has not been as hot as I was predicting. I have read several articles this year about success stories in this area but I have actually encountered very few first hand. The tools to analyze the unstructured content are good but are still relatively expensive and require a lot of services (more expensive). Maybe that will change in the next year or so. I can only score myself a 1 out of 5 for this one.

So my final grade is a 72% which according to my daughter in High School is only a “C”. Well I will have to do better than that so stand by for my 2012 BI predictions coming in the next few weeks.

Dashboards Making Big Waves at Omani Aluminium Company

By
Paul
Published: November 21, 2011Posted in: Business Intelligence, Paul Blogs on BITags: , ,
Dashboards Making Big Waves at Omani Aluminium Company

Oman is known for its camel racing. It’s quite fascinating to watch as there are no jockeys – just a bunch of brave and skillful people to get the camels lined up and started and then the rest is up to the camels to gallop to the finish line. Watching them, they have this easy loping stride and they don’t appear to be going fast but they cover a lot of ground quickly.

The high speed ferry boats in Oman are very similar. Sitting at the front, you do not think you are going fast but if you go to the back of the boat and see the giant wake being left by the multiple powerful engines, you quickly realize you are moving faster than most speedboats.

So I find myself on this super fast ferry on my way to the port of Sohar in the North of Oman to visit the Sohar Aluminum Plant, one of the largest in the Gulf region. We are taken on a fascinating tour of the entire manufacturing process producing tons of aluminum ingots as its end product. The plant is only about three years old and is fully automated, efficient and clean.  It employs over a thousand people and boasts an impressive track record of productivity. The company puts safety first as its top priority and has not recorded a single injury in over 730 days – impressive. In addition, the company has put together a Corporate Social Responsibility program that both encourages input from the workers and gives back to the local community.

In the middle of the tour, one of the Sohar Aluminium supervisors is explaining the key metrics that their particular area is measured by and one of the other visitors makes a remark that management never really looks at that type of detail, they are just interested in the final production numbers. The supervisor immediately responds saying that is definitely not the case at Sohar Aluminium because they have a Business Intelligence dashboard that is viewed daily throughout the company by everybody which shows all their key performance indicators and how they are doing against their daily, weekly, monthly and annual goals.

Everybody in the organization is looking at the same data and they can see the metrics for other areas. This has created a remarkable culture change in the company as everyone has visibility to these metrics and realizes that their daily actions actually influence the numbers and values that they are seeing every day.  The fact that the dashboard is built in Xcelsius with visually compelling dynamic visibility features and is simple and intuitive to use has also played a big part in the successful user adoption.

Displaying the metrics was only a part of the Sohar Aluminium dashboard solution.  One of the biggest challenges facing the company was getting the shift supervisors and others responsible for the metrics to enter the actual values into the system in a timely fashion. They solved this problem by extending Xcelsius using InfoBurst to create a data input dashboard so the data can be entered through the dashboard itself. This dashboard not only displayed what metrics were missing but it also triggered an alert email that was sent to the supervisor if the data was not entered within 15 minutes of the end of the shift.  If the data had still not being entered within 30 minutes, then a second alert in red was sent to the supervisor again and the General Manager for that area was automatically copied.  This has been incredibly effective as the company has seen almost no late entries since the system was implemented earlier this year.

The dashboard is packed with many more innovative features and you can read about many of them in this PDF of the case study.

Sohar Aluminium was so happy about its KPI dashboard that they have continued to add to it and have even created an operational dashboard that takes direct feeds from temperature and wind speed gauges that are dynamically refreshed every minute. If the recommended thresholds are exceeded, which is not unusual since their plant is located in the Omani desert, then alerts flash up on the dashboard as well as sent directly to the relevant supervisor’s Blackberry phone to tell them to stop certain operations that would be unsafe.

So just like the racing camels and high speed ferry, Sohar Aluminium has covered a lot of distance in a very short period of time. Their initial dashboard solution was developed and operational in just four weeks.

When I presented this case study in a keynote at a conference this week sponsored by large Gulf Aluminium industry leaders, there was a lot of interest and I would not be surprised if, in the future, Oman will be as well known for its innovative dashboards as for its racing camels!

InfoSol Delivers through Riots and Earthquakes

By
Paul
Published: October 30, 2011Posted in: InfoSol, Paul Blogs on BITags:

Portland, Oregon is definitely a rainy place as I discovered this weekend while attending the Net Impact conference but it is also known for its bookstores, micro breweries, bicycles and weirdness.  These last two items come together when Portland holds its annual naked bike race every summer.

I went to dinner with two of my colleagues from InfoSol, Amy and Teresa, who live and work out of Portland. Teresa was halfway through a two week engagement delivering Xcelsius design consulting services at a client in Oakland, California. She loves her weird home town of Portland so much that she flew back for the weekend.

So I asked her how the project was going and she casually answered, “Fine but it has been difficult to eat out some nights and get some sleep”.  Teresa then explained that the hotel she was staying at is less than a block from City Hall, downtown Oakland where the local Occupy Wall Street movement has been camping out and where things got a little out of control this week.

So the night the trouble started, she was walking down the street heading  for a restaurant when she ran into a solid wall of Oakland police officers decked out in full riot gear. She turned back and stopped in at a Subway to get a take-out sandwich to bring back to the hotel.  She tried to hurry the guy making the sandwich but those “sandwich artists” take their work seriously. As she was paying she saw streams of protesters heading past the Subway in the direction of the riot police and then all hell broke loose as she heard explosions (probably flash bang grenades). By the time she got outside, it looked like a war zone and she scurried back to the hotel.

There was little peace there due to the three police helicopters hovering outside her hotel room on the 26thfloor making sleep almost impossible.  Then, just as she thought she might doze off, there was an earthquake causing the building to both shake and sway.

I sat there, hardly believing what I was hearing. Most people would have just packed up and gone home at that point but Teresa delivered her first week of services and will be back again this week to deliver the rest.

Last month another InfoSol consultant, Simon, was delivering Data Integrator services in Washington DC when an earthquake caused the ventilator in the middle of the room to come crashing down. Fortunately nobody was hurt and he finished the services in another location after the building was evacuated.

Wow – this kind of dedication is nothing short of inspirational. Teresa and Simon – you rock!

Playing Games at SAP TechEd 2011

By
Paul
Published: September 28, 2011Posted in: Blog Featured, Paul Blogs on BITags: , , , ,
Playing Games at SAP TechEd 2011

This year’s SAP TechEd held in the world’s capital of gaming – Las Vegas – got off to an aptly appropriate start with a keynote presentation from Dr. Jane McGonigal entitled “Gamification” explaining how inventing new work and business practices based around games that engage employees, customers and vendors in the workplace is about to explode into a multi-billion dollar market space.

Citing examples from companies like Zappos, Dr. McGonigal quite convincingly explained how games create positive emotions like joy, relief, love surprise, pride, curiosity, awe, contentment, creativity and excitement. Judging by my own teenage son’s reaction after playing World of Warcraft or Call for Duty, I might add a couple more emotions to that list.

A recent study estimated that people around the world spend a total of 3 billion hours a week playing online games alone which certainly would indicate that we like playing games. At the same time, the cost for not being positive in the workplace has been estimated to cost businesses around $300 billion a year. McGonigal explained that the opposite of play is not work but depression and that games can help to create “super empowered, hopeful individuals” and make work more fun than fun!

We then played a game of “massively multiple player Thumb Wrestling” to show how playing games gets our oxytocin flowing and makes us feel good and I must admit that I left the session pretty upbeat but with some sore thumbs!

The next day it rained – a rare occurrence for Las Vegas and I got pretty wet running to the Starbucks to get my wakeup fix. The detour made me late for the first keynote so I ran across the bridge from the Starbucks to the Venetian which was not very smart on that slippery surface. About half way across, I saw my feet appearing at the same height as my chest and my butt was the next part of my body to strike the ground. I had but one thought – “Save the Café Mocha”!  It was in my right hand which I held high and upright and despite some nasty bruises and soaking wet pants, the Mocha was saved.

I entered the keynote dripping wet and sore but triumphant (Mocha in hand) as I watched a video of Hasso Plattner declaring once again how SAP has reinvented itself in terms of technology through HANA. The theme was continued with several case studies and video testimonies, including showing how HANA can analyze a boat load of data faster than someone can bake a cake. It was all very similar to Sapphire four months earlier. Interestingly, a quick show of hands in the audience of over 4,000 indicated that less than 2% of attendees were considering HANA in the next 12 months.

There was some mention of Sybase and Sybase IQ with an impressive established install base of customers.

Then there were breakout sessions galore although, like Sapphire, not that many on BusinessObjects.

One session that I did find very interesting was entitled “Pervasive Location Analytics” which was an intriguing look at the growing significance of the location dimension in data and how Google, in particular, have had a big influence on this. There was a fascinating case study shown where the Guardian Newspaper in the UK  (www.Guardian.co.uk) used location analytics to determine if poverty was a factor in the recent riots in the UK. By layering the locations where the riots occurred and arrests were made with the location of the addresses of those arrested with a heat map of the average income level of those areas, they were able to see a correlation.

The presenter mentioned that SAP has recently signed a 3-year deal with Google to use Google Maps and other Google location API’s with its applications and they had also signed a partnership agreement with Centigon Solutions (www.CentigonSolutions.com) to use and resell their Google Maps plug-in for Xcelsius dashboards.

Like Sapphire, TechEd is just too big with too much going for me. It is hit or miss on the sessions (some useful, some not). I am not sure if I will go next year but, if I do, I will definitely avoid playing thumb wars and running on wet slippery bridges.

 

If you are interested in the idea of gamification, here’s a TED talk from Feb 2010 by Jane McGonigal on how Gaming Can Make a Better World.

Zoned Out in Zurich

By
Paul
Published: September 25, 2011Posted in: Europe Trip 2011, Paul Blogs on BITags:
Zoned Out in Zurich

After a 10 hour transatlantic flight followed by just 3 hours of sleep, I find myself walking to Victoria Station in London at 4:45 am local time to catch the 5 am train to the airport to fly to Zurich, Switzerland. I was not so much walking as sleep walking and when I arrived at the platform only to be told the train is delayed because the driver has not arrived, my only thought was one of envy as I visualized that happy train driver all snuggled up in a cozy bed.

I am attending an SAP BusinessObjects Add On conference showcasing the latest and greatest third party add-on solutions for BusinessObjects and I am here to present InfoBurst which has become increasingly popular in Europe where now over 50 customers use it for BI report and Xcelsius dashboard scheduling, bursting and publishing.

The event is held at a unique resort on top of the highest peak in Zurich with spectacular views of both the city and the snow capped Alps in the distance.

The resort itself is quite eclectic in décor with a maze of rooms on many levels. My presentation is scheduled to take place in a room called the Cave, appropriately named as it was situated in the basement.

I head off in search of the Cave about 30 minutes before my presentation and wind my way through a series of dimly lit corridors and find a room with a low ceiling full of tables and chairs with a sign outside identifying it as the Cave. It looks more like a wine bar and is actually decorated with bottles of wine but at one end is a large flat screen TV with a monitor connection hanging from it so I assume this must be the place. I whip out my laptop and get busy setting up for my presentation which involves moving tables due to the short monitor cable and adjusting the projected screen size to fit the monitor properly.
While I am busy beavering away, I am interrupted by a group of hotel staff who walk in carrying their lunches. In their broken English they explain that this is their lunch room but I confidently tell them that I am presenting here and they kindly agree to move to another room.

About 5 minutes before the start of the presentation, nobody has arrived and I start to think that maybe I am in the wrong place. I wander back through the corridors and go through a door that opens to an outside loading ramp. I see a conference sign pointing to a room called the cave in the opposite direction. I follow the sign and walk into a room full of people eagerly waiting for me to start my presentation!

Apart from feeling very stupid, I needed to move at lightning speed to get my laptop moved and ready to go since everything in Switzerland starts on time.

I just made it but I could not help thinking that maybe that train driver at Victoria station had not overslept and that, like me, he was just zoned out and showed up at the wrong train!

Web Intelligence vs. Xcelsius vs. Explorer

By
Paul
Published: July 31, 2011Posted in: Business Intelligence, Paul Blogs on BI, XcelsiusTags: , , ,
Web Intelligence vs. Xcelsius vs. Explorer

I was recently at a BusinessObjects user group meeting in Pennsylvania and a representative from SAP who was presenting asked the audience of about 50 attendees if any of them were using SAP Explorer. Not a single person raised their hand. He then asked how many of them had seen Explorer and about 10 people raised their hands. The presenter appeared surprised but I was not.

Although SAP has been very heavily promoting the Explorer product for the last couple of years, the adoption of this newer search based query tool has been slow. There are many reasons for this but the one that stands out the most is, that as a Business Intelligence tool, it is limited.  While SAP BusinessObjects offers a number of Business Intelligence tools for different functions, the majority of customers prefer to pick just one or two for mass user consumption and they will tend to pick tools that can provide the widest range of functionality.

I recently conducted an ad-hoc survey of about 200 BusinessObjects customers in the U.S. encompassing small, medium and large companies and found that the top BI tools in use were Web Intelligence, Crystal Reports, Desktop Intelligence and Xcelsius. When looking at which tools they had most recently added in the last 3 years and were strategic for their future BI initiatives, it was Web Intelligence and Xcelsius.

Web Intelligence is seen as an end-to-end BI reporting and query analysis tool. It has both a web based version and a rich client version to be used off-line. It has good integration with Microsoft through Live Office and use of web parts and overall it has a rich array of functionality for self-service BI.

Xcelsius is probably the best BI data visualization and dashboard tool on the market today. It allows customized development of complete end-to-end BI solutions. It integrates with Microsoft, Adobe, Email, Google, Web as well as a host of other BI solutions. It also has a rich offering of add-on components and functionality to enable write back, alerts and mobile integration.

When we look at SAP Explorer, it is not really in the same category as Web Intelligence and Xcelsius. Explorer is a search web-based query tool for simple end-user ad-hoc analysis with limited reporting and customization ability. It can integrate with other BusinessObjects tools like Web Intelligence and Xcelsius and allows export to Excel but there is no real integration with other applications. It is a great solution for “one off” BI applications but not for end-to-end solutions.

SAP has been previewing the next potential edition of Explorer known as Exploration Views since the beginning of the year and this allows more end-user control and customization of the views.

Both Explorer and Exploration Views demonstrate very nicely and it is easy to get excited when seeing them but then the same could be said for Web Intelligence and Xcelsius.

I am sure we will continue to see more of Explorer but I see the future strength of the SAP BusinessObjects BI solutions remaining with Web Intelligence and Xcelsius for the foreseeable future.

Image Credit: http://www.presentermedia.com

Terabyte, Petabyte, Exabyte, Zettabyte, Yottabyte

By
Paul
Published: July 18, 2011Posted in: Business Intelligence, Paul Blogs on BI, SapphirenowTags: , ,
Terabyte, Petabyte, Exabyte, Zettabyte, Yottabyte

When I started my career in I.T., one of the first computers I encountered was a Xerox Sigma mainframe that filled a room and played the “Stars and Stripes” tune when it was in idle mode. This large scale computer of its day had a massive 8K of memory.

In the last three decades, we have moved from Kilobytes (KB) to Megabytes (MB) to Terabytes (TB) of memory. This is hard to fathom since it only seemed like yesterday that a Terabyte of disk space was huge and now we are talking about Terabytes of memory. Well maybe not all of us, but certainly the big BI vendors are talking about it a lot.

At this year’s Sapphire event, SAP made a lot of noise about its new High Performance Analytical Appliance (HANA) and the in-memory database it uses that enables real-time business intelligence.  While there were a lot of potential uses for this discussed, there was one that really struck me as both poignant and cool at the same time. It was an energy company in the U.K. that was using HANA to analyze electrical usage patterns for its residential and commercial customers.  They had recently moved to electronic meter readings that were being recorded every four hours generating millions of data readings that could be compared against previous readings over many days. As a result of this analysis, one customer was seen to be using 30% more electricity over a 12 hour period that any other 12 hour period for the previous month. This caused an alert and they called the customer who turned out to be a bakery that had accidently left an oven on overnight!

This energy company is also talking about providing customer facing business intelligence to allow its residential customers to compare their energy usage with their neighbors in the same street or comparable houses in order that they can see if they are possibly using too much.

Real-time business intelligence is not practical for every situation but this example shows that having the ability to house large amounts of data in memory with high speed appliances like HANA can enable valuable analysis to be done in time periods not previously possible.

So as we move into this brave new world of Terabyte memory appliances, what’s next? Well, a quick Google search showed me there is the Petabyte (1024 Terabytes) followed by the Exabyte (1024 Petabytes) followed by the Zettabyte (1024 Exabytes) and then the Yottabyte (1024 Zettabytes or 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176 bytes). Just to put this in perspective, Apple cites that the entire contents of all U.S. academic libraries could be stored on just 2 Petabytes

Will any of us be around to see those Yottabyte memory chips? Maybe.

Sapphire Scribbles and Quotes

By
Paul
Published: June 1, 2011Posted in: Business Intelligence, Paul Blogs on BITags:
Sapphire Scribbles and Quotes

The 2011 joint SAP Sapphire/ASUG Annual Conference came and went in as large a blur as the size of the event itself. With an estimated 14,000 attendees and an overwhelming number of tracks, sessions, demonstrations, meetings and exhibits, the best I could hope for was snapshots and slices of information over the three days.

The panel discussion on the Monday morning keynote turned into a feisty debate between two of the panelists,  well-known scientist and co-founder of the string field theory, Dr. Michio Kaku and  innovative thought leader and author, Michael Schrage.

 Kaku painted a future where we move from commodity capitalism to intellectual capitalism and technology will change the world with imaginative new products like “smart” Barbie dolls! Schrage expressed that the line between infrastructure and applications has become blurred. However when Kaku said that technology enabled individuals will change the world and that we need to educate for the digital economy, Schrage disagreed by saying that a University degree is not going to make a difference and there is a lack of consistency and that we cannot mass produce minds.

 Kaku was not happy and launched into a passionate defense of his point by stating that the US has the worst education system in science in the world ranking top of the “stupid index” and that the only thing that has saved the US from falling behind as an innovator is the H1B Visa. He went on saying that almost 100% of PhD candidates in sciences in the US are foreign born and that there are distorted incentives for Americans in university to study sciences.  The danger the US now faces is that these foreign born scientists now have both choices and incentives to go to other countries besides the US.

The afternoon ASUG keynote featuring Michael Eisner, ex-CEO of Disney, was much tamer. Eisner promoted his new book about successful business partnerships and his seven guiding principles to being successful in business one of which was failure (to be successful you need to fail).

SAP heavily promoted HANA – their new High Performance Analytic Appliance (I know that doesn’t spell HANA but it almost does) with its in-memory database- throughout the conference. The keynotes on Wednesday were almost completely dedicated to HANA with multiple customer testimonials and examples of potential usages. Dr. Hasso Plattner, Chairman of the SAP Supervisory Board and a great favorite at Sapphire meetings, did an excellent job explaining the technology.

Overall there was less emphasis on the SAP BusinessObjects suite compared to last year’s Sapphire even though BI 4.0 is a big new release this year. 

In the SAP Campus areas, there were some very good customer panel discussions with users talking about their successful solution implementations.

As always, there was plenty to see in the Exhibits area from a variety of vendors and the top entertainment award was a tossup between the racing cars at the CA stand and the ball jugglers at Oracle.

Here are a collection of my favorite quotes from the keynotes this year :

“Never confuse a clear vision with a short distance.” – Michael Schrage, Thought Leader and Author

 

“Big brother is not as much a concern as little bother.” – Dr. Michio Kaku, Scientist

“To punish failure is another way to encourage mediocrity.” – Michael Eisner, Former CEO of Disney

 

“The punch card system was aggregation free…. HANA mimics this…” – Prof. Dr. Hasso Plattner, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of SAP AG

If you registered for the conference, you can still visit the sapphirenow website where you can watch on demand replays of some of the sessions.

Blog thumbnail/photo is of Gabriel Byrne talking about in memory computing in the opening keynote Imagining Business In 2015.

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