Taking place in sunny Nice, SAP’s Insider event has been full of talking points. Steve Lucas, President, SAP Platform Solutions, stole the show in the keynote where he took aim at Oracle, Tableau and discussed the company’s cloud future.
CBR has compiled a list of the biggest talking points.
1. Oracle, Tableau and Salesforce in the firing line
There is no love lost between Oracle and SAP, with both taking swipes at each other from time to time, but Lucas upped the ante with declarations that it is the one company which it won’t work with.
Lucas, said: "One company we really can’t stand is Oracle." Several other references were made to the company – all negative.
Tableau came in for the heaviest criticism, with Lucas dubbing it a ‘dead-end technology’ and, ‘s**t’. The company which he referred to as ‘Voldemort’ was highlighted as an example of how not to use data, with Lucas saying that data needs to influence business decisions and not just be good to look at.
The final company which Lucas took a swipe at was Salesforce, another rival and one which SAP has a frosty relationship with. This time the focus was around cloud and how well SAP is performing.
The brunt of the criticism was aimed at Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce, with Lucas saying: "Benioff is living in denial, he won’t recognise we have many more cloud users than Salesforce."
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2. HANA
The company wants its HANA platform to be the foundation of everything it does, whether it is with data analytics, IoT or app development.
The conference gave the company a chance to roll out Service Pack 10, which gave it a number of new enhancements including greater integration with Hadoop solutions Cloudera and Hortonworks. It wants you to know that it doesn’t matter where you bring your data from, you can use it on HANA.
The company has a clear eye on the future with IoT features, it isn’t just talking about the data, it wants companies to be able to use it, right now. With this in mind it enhanced its data synchronisation to aid developers building IoT and data intensive apps.
3. Cloud
HANA Cloud Platform, the company’s un-sung solution. We all know SAP for its business solutions, data analytics but its platform is perhaps less well advertised. This is changing, the company wants to utilise it more.
HCP, which will be able to run on premise in the future is targeting developers, already with 100,000 on board and companies such as IBM utilising it.
The company is keen to stress that all developer licenses are free and will be forever, free to develop as many as you want and then a per user per month fee.
Lucas, said: "People will come to HCP because of the data we have access to, we have the apps and we have the data and development platform."
4. Predictive Analytics
Known for its real time in-memory analytics, the company is really pushing its predictive analytics features and it is aiming to remove SAS from the equation, Lucas on SAS: "Could be totally replaced."
With the goal clear, it brought out its Predictive Analytics version 2.2, aiming to make predictive analytics pervasive in all businesses to access the value in data.
The ever present Lucas, said: "There is immense, untapped value in data and a huge opportunity to translate that value into tangible business outcomes."
More automation and less human interaction is the way forward that the company predicts, why have someone pushing that button when a machine can?
5. IoT
The Internet of Things is deeply tied in with data, analytics and cloud to both enable it and to improve solutions, the key goal for this is to make sure there is value to both customers and businesses.
While it may still be seen as just another buzzword at the moment, SAP is working to make sure that for businesses it is a reality.
Demonstrated during the first day’s keynote, a remote control car, we’ve all seen them before, but this one as hooked up to sensors and was feeding real time data which could be analysed.
Working with AMG, IoT is becoming a reality to build better engines through the combination of cloud and data analytics, all powered by HANA.
The common theme from the show? HANA.
