Real-time is now says SAP: Sapphire Now report

That's the message from SAP CTO and member of executive board Vishal Sikka and SAP co-founder and supervisory board chairman Hasso Plattner. "We believe that enterprises are looking to unleash the power of the existing landscapes," said Sikka, speaking live from Frankfurt and via satellite to Orlando at last week's Sapphire Now event. "And we believe in doing that without breaking continuity, without bringing disruption to your existing systems," he added. Sikka spoke of the "IT landscapes of choice" that have helped long-term customers with SAP through 30 years of technology and business changes – but then turned to SAP innovation in terms of "real, real time and reach". "Every once in a while, a set of technologies converges that changes everything; entirely new sorts of innovations and products become possible," declared Sikka. "We believe that we are upon that moment in time." What he meant was SAP's plans for a high-performance analytic appliance to enable real-time analytics on live transactional data in SAP Business Suite and SAP R/3 – but also to supercharge SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse and SAP BusinessObjects, "Today SAP is reinventing the real-time enterprise," said Sikka. As for the expanding reach of SAP applications and data, Sikka noted that, although 'on-premise' systems will be around for a long time, on-demand solutions, such as SAP Carbon Impact, will be available as simple cloud extensions. He also emphasized that SAP NetWeaver remains SAP's platform to enable 'business without boundaries', and that it is being extended into cloud and mobile environments and will include real-time computing components. Plattner, meanwhile, took a slightly different stance, focusing on the "Real Enterprise 2.0, powered by in-memory computing". For him, the fact that SAP's latest solutions bring risk-free in-memory computing to existing ERP and business intelligence users, is the big deal. His main message was about "thinking backwards to move forward" – meaning bringing new capabilities to currently installed SAP systems. And as proof of success, he claimed that SAP had set up a parallel in-memory database in 48 hours at one of its larger customer's sites. "For the average customer, the implementation time will be even quicker: about two hours," asserted Plattner. "Best of all, the implementation will occur without changing any of the customer's software or losing any data quality," he added. What matters just as much, said Plattner, is that all users, including executives, will directly access SAP software to pull the information they need to take appropriate decisions and actions – answering any question they want in less than a second. "This new type of enterprise interaction will change the behaviour of boardroom interactions and place a greater emphasis on executives asking the right questions, not waiting for the right answers," said Plattner. "As a result, executives no longer use energy and time to speculate or debate about what the question is, and instead get to the problem quickly."