As the lead for SAP’s HANA business in Asia Pacific & Japan, customers constantly ask me how they can accelerate their business processes to meet the demands of a digital economy. A key challenge that resonates with all customers, across various industries, is seeking innovation and tracking results in real time. Traditional databases, unfortunately, have not allowed organizations to meet these demands successfully.
In this post, I’d like to discuss the fundamental problem with traditional databases and highlight why in-memory computing is the only viable option for organizations in a digital economy.
Absurd Complexity – The Fundamental Data Management Problem
The absurd complexity of traditional database systems, proliferated by competitors over the last 40 years, is killing innovation. This is a common problem faced by many organizations across Asia Pacific. While CIOs are aware that delivering innovation is key, the sheer complexity of traditional databases and the costs of “keeping the lights on” deplete their IT budgets and stifles innovation!
In the last month, I met numerous CIOs across Australia, India, Korea and Japan who are forced to manage outdated and complex data infrastructures on traditional database systems. Given the limitations of a traditional database system, CIOs are only able to manage a single business workload at any given time, resulting in massive data duplications and data processing latency.
I recently presented this data management problem at the SAP Forum in Seoul, South Korea. Watch this short video to understand why SAP HANA is so fundamentally different.
In this post, I’d like to discuss the fundamental problem with traditional databases and highlight why in-memory computing is the only viable option for organizations in a digital economy.
Absurd Complexity – The Fundamental Data Management Problem
The absurd complexity of traditional database systems, proliferated by competitors over the last 40 years, is killing innovation. This is a common problem faced by many organizations across Asia Pacific. While CIOs are aware that delivering innovation is key, the sheer complexity of traditional databases and the costs of “keeping the lights on” deplete their IT budgets and stifles innovation!
In the last month, I met numerous CIOs across Australia, India, Korea and Japan who are forced to manage outdated and complex data infrastructures on traditional database systems. Given the limitations of a traditional database system, CIOs are only able to manage a single business workload at any given time, resulting in massive data duplications and data processing latency.
I recently presented this data management problem at the SAP Forum in Seoul, South Korea. Watch this short video to understand why SAP HANA is so fundamentally different.
Traditional Databases – Why Did It Get So Complex?
Traditional databases can only manage a single business workload at any given time – what does this mean? To illustrate, let’s look at a customer call center. When a call center application is set up, the underlying data infrastructure is tuned and configured to support that specific application. It works great for that application, but as soon as there’s a requirement to do something different, such as gather basic business insights, the system is unable to do so. The data, then, has to be moved or duplicated, which creates additional work and impacts business productivity.
Now, consider that a customer has to run multiple line-of-business applications. A retailer that runs a call center will also need customer support, marketing, manufacturing, logistics, and financial and sales systems. Each of these systems will start to duplicate data to support business insights, which in turn, multiplies the level of complexity.
It gets even more complicated if we want to look at multiple types of data at the same time. Let’s use finance data coupled with merchandising, sales or customer data as an example. Over the last 20 years, organizations have been duplicating existing data into a data warehouse. The sheer size of this data makes it a challenge to collate the data warehouse in a timely manner. Organizations are forced to summarize and aggregate the data, resulting in a loss of detail and compromising business performance.
While the process of companies going through throes of complexities to obtain business insights does not make business sense, in reality, this has been the only available option to obtain fact based business insights with a traditional database system. This becomes an organizational risk given that these business insights have become a critical differentiator for companies.
Collapsing the (Absurd) Complexity With Innovation
With SAP HANA, we break the limitations of traditional database systems by removing the silos and providing a single platform for transaction, operational, warehousing, machine, event and unstructured data all stored together – ONE real-time system operating on ONE copy of data, supporting any type of business workload simultaneously.
This is only possible due to SAP HANA’s unique and natively built, in-memory computing engine, which allows customers to consolidate data silos and collapse the absurd complexity created by traditional database systems. It ultimately allows organizations to spend less time integrating and more time innovating. The adoption numbers of SAP HANA in Asia Pacific speak for themselves – to date there are over 1,000 SAP HANA customers across Asia.
SAP HANA is at the core of SAP’s strategy. It has enabled us to build powerful new applications including S/4 HANA and provide our customers a platform to innovate. SAP HANA has become the engine that powers our cloud and business networks.
The future possibilities of SAP HANA excite me. I firmly believe the platform’s disruptive ability to simplify 40 years of data inefficiency will be key to accelerate a customer’s business processes to meet the demands of a digital economy.
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