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SAP makes big companies effective with Big Data. Competitors are crying
January 14, 2013 | Author: Michael Stromann
In recent years, SAP was probably the least innovative IT giant (compared to competitors Oracle, Microsoft, IBM). All SAP's own innovative projects mostly failed (remember Business ByDesign), and the only thing that SAP could do - is buying other companies (SuccessFactors, SyBase, Ariba). But at this time, SAP is going to outdo all the competitors on the wave of new trendy technology - Big Data. What is Big Data?
Big Data - is a set of technologies for fast processing of very large amounts of data (structured and unstructured). How Big Data is different from what was before? Roughly speaking, instead of a single server working with multiple data warehouses, there is one database running on multiple servers. Perhaps you, as a businessman or manager, don't care, but in result this change enables IT system to run much faster.
For large companies data management turns into nightmare. The video above shows how one beautiful database turns into monstrous IT system that can't even tell you how many units of product you can now sell to customer. Because the product is stored in multiple warehouses, can be reserved by other branches and your system does not know when the supplier will deliver new batch, because it's controlled by another system.
The Big Data promises large companies an opportunity to manage business in real time.
So, SAP, was one of the first to create the own Big Data platform, called SAP HANA, and recently also announced that its ERP-system SAP Business Suite can work on top of this platform. Experts say that neither Oracle, nor Microsoft, nor IBM are able to offer such an integrated solution for large companies and they are not even close to SAP in this segment.
But that's not all bad news for the competition. The fact is that SAP's ERP system always used the database management systems developed by Oracle, Microsoft and IBM. Now, SAP will transfer the customers to its own platform. And that is about 60% of the large companies in the world.
See also: Top 10 Online ERP software
