SAP last week held a demonstration of its new HANA-powered Business Suite at Dubai Autodrome, announcing that the new suite is now available on the Middle Eastern market.
At the Audi Driving Experience Centre, in one of the conference rooms at the racetrack, Qais Gharaibeh, UAE Managing Director, SAP, said that the venue was chosen to illustrate the speed that Business Suite on HANA offers. Audi was also a SAP customer, he hastened to add.
"What we're talking about today is speed. But it's also being able to deliver business value through speed," Gharaibeh said. "It's not just about keeping up with the pace for businesses; it's more like creating a pace and outpacing everyone else, and coming up with new innovations to define their industries."
HANA was launched in 2010, and Business Suite on HANA is the latest product using the in-memory technology. SAP claimed that the technology can speed up business processes by over 100,000 times.
The idea behind Business Suite on HANA is to combine the transactional data platform and the analytical data platform into one. SAP claims that this can increase the speed and performance of transactions, as well as perform real-time analytics.
In terms of use cases, products companies could gain insight into how much they should be manufacturing at various times of the year, according to Jason Bath, Director of Database and Technology Business, SAP, who was also present at Dubai Autodrome.
SAP's demonstration of Business Suite on HANA showed the ability to analyse 20 million data entries through one clean-looking dashboard. A firm could work out how much capital it would have three months down the line, look into segments that fail to chase payments properly, and narrow down particular sales people's numbers.
All of this was done in real time – Bath said that the six or so processes that were demonstrated would usually take up to two days to complete without Business Suite on HANA. Of course, he added, the suite could be customised to fit into any enterprise app.
Businesses want the kind of flexibility that enterprise applications afford, said Ranjit Rajan, Research Director, Software and IT Services, IDC Middle East.
"Over the next five years, we're expecting spending on enterprise apps to grow by 8.1 percent, despite all the issues about the economic situation globally," he said. "More and more organisations are looking to adopt enterprise applications. It's good news from a business perspective."
Rajan added that speed, however, was not enough, and that this is where in-memory technology comes into play, as it can provide real-time analytics as well as faster transactional processes.
"We expect this technology to be quickly adopted by organisations here in the UAE – especially organisations who value the need for far more rapid transactions, as well as organisations which are dealing with large volumes of data."
To the delight of SAP, Rajan also said that the vendor was leading the way in in-memory technology.
