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Sapphirenow Archive

The HANA Show – Sapphire 2012

By
Paul
Published: May 29, 2012Posted in: Business Intelligence, Paul Blogs on BI, SAP Business Objects, SapphirenowTags:
The HANA Show – Sapphire 2012

This is the third time I have attended the annual SAP and Americas SAP User Group extravaganza known as Sapphire. The size and scale of the event is such that it is only possible to experience a slice of everything going on and it is very easy to get lost.

During the last 4 years, SAP has undergone a tremendous transformation. It’s acquisition of BusinessObjects back in 2008 has made it the leading Business Intelligence software vendor globally with BI and Analytics accounting for more than 50% of its license revenues in the last couple of years. The subsequent acquisition of Sybase spearheaded SAP’s drive into the mobility space with the Sybase Unwired Platform and is now leading a new charge into the database space with Sybase ASE. Then the purchase of cloud applications vendor Success Factors at the beginning of the year and recent announcement to acquire Ariba indicates SAP is serious about being a major player in the Cloud space too.

Yet the keynote presentations at this year’s Sapphire talked very little about these solutions as for the third year in a row, the SAP executives spoke mainly about one topic – HANA – their in-memory database appliance. Most of the keynotes included inviting HANA customers on the stage to talk about how HANA is either helping them or expecting to help them.

SAP has built its fortune and reputation on its business software applications which remains its core business, yet HANA is a combination of hardware and in-memory database which have not traditionally been its strengths. SAP has always considered itself to be both database and hardware agnostic but that now appears to be changing. Despite 3 years of enormous promotion, HANA is still new and has a long way to go in its evolution. It was interesting that most of the SAP executives speaking mentioned the FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) being bandied around by others about HANA, but I think that is just a reaction to how heavily SAP is promoting it – one attendee told me it can do everything including washing the dishes!

The customers invited to be interviewed in the keynotes were impressive, especially Ron Dennis, Chairman of McLaren who said they do not get involved in anything unless they can make a difference. He described McLaren as being very good at “sit down sports” and dealing with the art of the impossible. They are a perfect candidate to put HANA to the test and that is just what they are planning to do over the coming months. Ron promised to be back at Sapphire next year to tell whether their experience was good or bad. That could mean another HANA show at next year’s Sapphire – lucky us!

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.

Xcelsius Will Always Be Xcelsius

By
Paul
Published: August 3, 2010Posted in: Business Intelligence, Paul Blogs on BI, Sapphirenow, XcelsiusTags: , ,
Xcelsius Will Always Be Xcelsius

So what’s in a name? Some people will tell you “everything” while others will tell you it depends on what you are naming.

Some products have not only become defined by their name but have been so successful they end up defining all products of the same type like “Kleenex” and “Band-Aid” .  Others have found out that their product name can end up portraying the wrong image like Chevrolet’s Nova car – “No va” meaning “it doesn’t go” in Spanish! The French company Bull Computers also had a hard time with its “Bull” named products in North America.  However, Bull also launched a clever marketing campaign around the ambiguity of its name entitled “Know Bull” which did get some attention.

At this year’s Sapphire, Sir Richard Branson told this great story of how when he went to register the name “Virgin” for his company in the UK, the company registration official turned it down because they deemed the name as rude. So Branson returned the next day with a dictionary showing the definition of “virgin” as being pure and they accepted it.

So I have been somewhat intrigued about recent forum discussions surrounding SAP’s decision to rename Xcelsius – their amazing and very popular dashboard product.

Xcelsius already had some name recognition when Business Objects acquired Infommersion (the original developers) in November 2005 but then proceeded to rename it Crystal Xcelsius. This resulted in a lot of confusion as people started to relate the product to Crystal Reports and thought it was an add-on to this report writer product.  So when the next major release was developed, the decision was made to drop the Crystal name and so Xcelsius 2008 came to market.

For the last two years Xcelsius has become one of the most popular and prolifically used BI dashboard products in the marketplace and its name has become synonymous with data visualization and dynamic dashboards. 

So why would you take this very well known product with such a cool and catchy name as Xcelsius and rename it SAP Crystal Dashboard Design or SAP Enterprise Dashboard Design?

Well apparently this is because SAP uses a “master brand strategy” where SAP is the master brand and the product brand name takes a back seat. 

So why not SAP Xcelsius?

Well this is because SAP also uses “descriptive naming” for all its products so in the case of Xcelsius, the back seat has been completely removed!

Since “SAP Crystal Dashboard Design” is so long, it is bound to become abbreviated. However, I doubt this will be shortened to “SCDD” since a Google search points you to the “California State Council on Development Disabilities” .  It is more likely to become “Dashboard Design” since that is the new descriptive product name.  A Google search on “Dashboard Design” comes up with about 2.5 million results starting off with Qlikview, followed by Tableau Software then Corda and SAP Crystal Dashboard Design comes in at about number 14.  Interestingly, there is little ambiguity when you search on “Xcelsius”.

Translating Dashboard Design into other languages may also prove interesting.  Xcelsius will always translate into Xcelsius in all languages and I have a feeling the name will persist. At the end of the day, it is not just the name that counts, it’s the product itself. Xcelsius is as unique as a product as it is as a name. I will never forget that day in 2005 when I first saw it and was totally blown away. Infommersion created something truly amazing and ahead of its time. It remains top of its class and, for me, Xcelsius will always be Xcelsius.

Sustainability and Sizzle at Sapphire – Day 1

By
Paul
Published: May 23, 2010Posted in: Paul Blogs on BI, Roambi, SapphirenowTags:
Sustainability and Sizzle at Sapphire – Day 1

For a humble BusinessObjects follower used to attending conferences where 3,000 attendees was considered big, stepping into my first SAP Sapphire event was somewhat like the small town guy going to the city for the first time.  With some 15,000 attendees, an exhibit and keynote area the size of half a dozen football fields and “no expense spared” technology on display everywhere, it was quite an experience. At times it felt like being at a baseball game with line ups for food, bathrooms and big projection screens showing live events in progress everywhere.

The incredible number of sessions , demos , exhibits and collaboration meetings means you can only participate in a fraction of what is available and you need to be quite discriminating – it’s a bit like going to Disneyworld and, in fact, I think by the second day a lot of people did wander off there!

The keynotes on the first day were impressive starting with an interview style session with Sir Richard Branson, the founder of the Virgin Empire. He provided some excellent insights into the success of Virgin explaining how employees who are proud of the company they work for will more likely be passionate about their jobs.  Branson also stressed the importance of reducing carbon emissions and talked about the new “carbon currency” and how they were working on new “clean” fuels projects producing fuels that will not harm the environment.

This aptly led into the second keynote from Al Gore who talked eloquently and intelligently about the importance of the sustainability initiative that is becoming an integral component of companies and institutions around the world.  Gore emphasized the need to build consensus and the brand enhancement that many companies are gaining by going green and implementing sustainability initiatives.  SAP has made a commitment to reduce its carbon footprint by 50% over the coming years while still substantially growing the company.

SAP had set up a whole segment in the exhibit area dedicated to its Sustainability offerings. I sat in on one of the presentations and was impressed at how comprehensive and integrated it appeared to be. 

Paul Grill, Giant iPad and Santiago Becerra

With so much to see in the Exhibit area, I tended to gravitate at first to the booths that had the most traffic. Since everyone appeared to be raffling off an iPad (no shortage here!), there had to be something more appealing to draw people in. That was certainly the case at the Mellmo booth with their giant-sized iPhone and iPad displaying its Roambi solution with some amazingly visual Business Intelligence analytics. Since SAP has identified one of its three major initiatives for this year as being mobile integration and delivery, this was a hot topic at Sapphire and RoamBi was white hot.

The best presentations I attended were the customer case studies and there was a great one in the Small and Medium Enterprise track where 3 customers were interviewed about the business benefits realized after implementing SAP Business Intelligence solutions.  One of the customers was an on-line supermarket chain and he explained how implementing BusinessObjects with a Data Mart allowed them to see that they were receiving a large number of complaints about their egg deliveries – mainly that some of the eggs were cracked or damaged. Their BusinessObjects solution allowed them to drill down on this data on a daily basis and analyze further what might be the potential causes. They subsequently discovered that there were a much larger number of complaints with eggs delivered in cardboard cartons compared to plastic cartons so they switched to plastic cartons only. In addition they implemented a simple new procedure for the packer to quickly visually check the eggs in the carton prior to packaging. The result of these two actions was a 75% reduction in complaints of egg deliveries.

I love these type of stories because it so clearly shows that Business Intelligence is a combination of analyzing data and human interpretation and action on the results.

All in all, it was a “cracking” first day at Sapphire!