I had the opportunity to attend the keynote presentation at the SAP BI2014 / HANA2014 conference in Orlando, organized by Wispubs. This used to the BusinessObject event and has slowly morphed into a SAP BI event – and this year – nor surprisingly – a HANA event. With 1800 guests attending it is a key event for the SAP BI community.
So here are my top 3 takeaways from the keynote:
The disruption message has arrived and (of course) HANA solves it – The red thread of Steve Lucas keynote was all around business disruption triggered by technology. And of course how SAP technology helps companies to be a disruptor and how that on the flipside can help them to be disrupted. But then I am sure SAP will also be happy to help enterprises that have been disrupted – granted they can still come up with the payment for the new software technology.
Lucas laid out how companies like Uber, WhatsApp and AirBnB have disrupted conventional businesses and achieve amazing valuations. Few observers may have noticed that WhatsApp has disrupted SAP’s Sybase 365 customers on the messaging side – but kudos for the openness and WhatsApp is certainly a poster child story not to be missed. Unfortunately the disruptive element came short in the customer stories presented in the keynote – with New South Wales Police and Fire, Velux and SpiritAero. We asked the same question in the analyst Q&A and Amit Sinha came back with a valid example of Italian tire manufacturer Pirelli selling tire usage data with the help of HANA. Definitively innovative and potentially disruptive for the competition.
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The SAP HANA Platform |
Lumira looms – The not so brilliantly named SAP BI product is making good progress – being used in two of the keynote demos. First to visualize the brackets of the current NCAA basketball tournament, a good actual high involvement example, that of course only jelled well with a North American audience aware of the tournament. We also saw new infographic capability in Lumira, which is a nice addition of functionality to enable storytelling. It’s a first version –e .g. we missed annotations – but a promising start. Now we can only hope SuccessFactors and Lumira developers will speak and cooperate and use common assets of Lumira Storytelling and SuccessFactors Presentations functionality. The combination is a high potential solution.
And Lumira is becoming more and more the replacement and go to product for older, former Business Objects products – as new functionality (e.g. Design Studio) is being built here – replacing e.g. the still popular Xcelsius.
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Lucas and colleagues in the midst of IoT demo |
HANA dominates – As expected – it is virtually impossible to get a new product from SAP or to build an innovative solution – without getting to use HANA. And as Lucas shared, this is to a certain point by design. If you want to build a mobile solution, well in the backend you will have HANA – like t or not. This certainly makes sense for SAP from a sales perspective – and even from a technology re-use perspective – but not all use cases of innovative applications require an in memory database. Just think of Hadoop based BigData scenarios. Mobile apps extending legacy. Social apps (probably Jam is HANA free at this point). Etc. SAP needs to be careful not to limit growth of some of its technology products for the sake of HANA integration.
SAP did a good job showing an Internet of Things (IoT) demo – tying together huge data volumes with personalization and predictive delivery and maintenance. Nice showcase.
MyPOV
A good start to the BI2014 / HANA2014 event that confirms HANA’s pivotal role. Lumira is getting better and I expect it to soon replace all former BO products, not that SAP is saying that officially any time soon. The general concerns I have around HANA (elasticity, programming language) are not addressed, but Sapphire is the event for that, not BI2014. It looks like the SAP technology products (+/- 50% of the SAP license revenue) are doing well. My concern is that SAP did not bring the full platform package – the HANA Cloud Platform (HCP) to this event – but enterprises want to build rich analytical applications. A missed opportunity. And not surprisingly – the HANA vs Hadoop relationship remains in the field of unknown forces avoiding each other.
I am still onsite for another 24 hours and will follow up with another post around more briefings and meetings setup here at BI2014 / HANA2014.
