SAP 2014 Direction - Moving Forward

Posted on January 24, 2014 at 01.32 PM - Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

What is SAP 2014 direction? How am I impacted by this direction? How do I anticipate this direction? These are some of the questions you might have regarding SAP direction. Following are the direction, which I had gathered from SAP Tech Ed presentation, Webinar, Blogs, etc...

1. “What” is more important than “How”

· SAP try to sell gimmick that organization should do business when the window of opportunity still opens, that is you have to react fast to know what is happening to your customers, prospective customers, competitors and partners. In this regard, SAP strongly push SAP HANA as computing and processing layer for all SAP products, not only for SAP BI, but to all other SAP products. With SAP HANA, you don’t have the question of HOW to get the data, since you can do data mining from the past, current and future (prediction or survey), it’s now a matter of WHAT you want to do with all your data, as you can extract and dissect data to your needs, and it is only limited by our own imagination. In this regard, sap has come up with SAP RTDP (Real Time Data Processing) http://www.sap.com/pc/tech/real-time-data-platform.html.

2. Separation between “Content” and “Container”

· Currently many companies like to have their application (content) together with infrastructure (container) on premises so that they feel more "control" on their overall systems.. However this comes with high initial cost, not only to get the infrastructure, but also to get the right resources to maintain the overall systems and applications. This is what SAP meant as disruptive environment where customer still have to perform many activities to make it non-disruptive. In the future, SAP believe customer should more focus on the application (content), and let other company worry about the infrastructure (container). In this regard, SAP has team up with Amazon to allow SAP product installation under Amazon Web Service (AWS) http://aws.amazon.com/. At the end of 2013, AWS was announced to be ready for productive environment. At the same time, SAP actually provide their own cloud system too http://www.sap.com/pc/tech/cloud.html. In the future, SAP will also provide this cloud with selected telecommunication companies in the world.

3. “Enhance” the end user experience and “empower” the end user

· Tablets and smart devices now are increasingly being used by many end users. PC sales has been overtook by smart devices sales since 2012. To respond to that trend, SAP has come up with SAP Fiori initiative. You can see a glimpse of it in this link http://www.sap.com/pc/tech/mobile/software/lob-apps/fiori/index.html. In fact the SAP Fiori toolkit also has been made available for download http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-50112 with OData connectivity support. So looks like SAP try to place it as ideal tool to showcase SAP HANA analytical reporting capabilities in multiple smart devices. SAP Fiori has also been designed in a way that the “power” end user may be able to design their own application as necessary.

Obviously, we are curious to see whether SAP HANA can become the “next” thing in the next 2-3 years from now, just like Netweaver wave 10 years ago. I can SAP is pushing very hard to get the buy in from the customer, all the last few years Tech Ed and SAP Hire have been mainly focused on HANA. So far, there are almost 1000 HANA implementations in the world, with some few customers managed to join 10,000 club (their analytical reports, etc are 10,000 faster than before HANA implementation) We have yet to see HANA implementation picking up in the local market, but once the critical mass is generated in the US and Europe, our region will follow suit. The question to all of us, are we ready for the next wave when it comes?

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