Dave's Adventures in Business Intelligence

I took quite a few notes during Vishal Sikka’s keynote that kicked off SAP TechEd 2011, and I’ll have a longer summary coming out later on. However, I wanted to share a few highlights while they’re still fresh.

Once again the primary themes are mobility, cloud computing, and of course Hana. Some might say boring, others would say stable. IT likes stable. There’s nothing like deciding to drop several hundred thousand to millions of dollars on new technology only to find out that you made the wrong bet. Hasso in a video said that Hana has moved from viable concept to extremely desirable technology. As a result, SAP is starting the drive to educate customers on how / when / where to use Hana in order to speed adoption.

Dr. Christoph Kollatz took the stage to talk more about Hana, saying that in the 10 months since the release (3 months in GA) Hana has had the fastest growing pipeline of any product from SAP. Ever. He shared some customer success stories that very specifically included the terms “went live” instead of “proof of concept.” Of course the focus was on how much more efficient processes had become as a result (days to hours to seconds in some cases) and I’ll share more details later. I’m sure it’s no surprise that the customer they provided as a reference was using Hana to replace Oracle. 😉

Customers will be able to start switching their BW data stores over to Hana starting with a release that should be available in November. It would be interesting to know what the most popular platforms are for BW currently, and what the financial impact will be on those companies if SAP customers start switching to Hana?

The most important note from my perspective is that Vishal reconfirmed the September 16th general availability date for BI 4.0. But overall BI 4.0 was a small part of the keynote, much like Sybase which didn’t even get mentioned until over an hour into the session.

The opening keynote last night was very interesting as well. It featured Dr. Jane McGonigal and the concept of “gamification” which I found fascinating. I want to let my thoughts marinate for a few days before I share what I got out of her talk though.