The entertaining presentation from Lucas had everything a SAP customer and tech rivalry enthusiast could dream of.
Taking aim at legacy systems and datacentres, Lucas was keen to point out the evil in the architecture, "You’ve been told it is ok to make copies of the data." Customers have been told for decades that you need to have multiple databases of the same data – all in Lucas’s opinion a money making move.
"All this copy, copy, copy has to stop sometime – it’s madness," said Lucas.
The company frequently works with others such as IBM, which has used its platform to develop a number of applications, but one company they won’t work with is Oracle with Lucas putting it bluntly; "One company we really can’t stand is Oracle."
This was the beginning of what bordered on a rant about dead end technology, particularly looking at data visualisation which doesn’t influence business decisions.
Lucas referred to Tableau as Voldemort before saying: "The Tableau product is s**t, it’s a dead end technology."
This wasn’t just a swipe at a rival company, it was highlighting the need to not just be able to view data, but to influence business decisions with it, which Lucas clearly believes Tableau does not do.
Of course, this criticism needed some backing up to prove that SAP can do it better, so Lucas took part in a brief demonstration with a remote control car. The purpose of the IoT car was to highlight how data can not just be collected and visualised, but also analysed through Lumira to create business value.
The HANA Cloud Platform was highlighted as the solution to many problems, including stopping data management tools from being sold on top, with Lucas confidently stating that SAP can do it all: "What’s the question? Because the answer will be HANA."
