SAP strums a CAROLE

MUMBAI: SAP India Tour echoed SAPPHIRE as expected. The decibels flocked around the ambitions of being a platform company and not just an application-suite vendor. The push towards database market was felt in full force, from presentation slides and press briefs high print to a fierce glint in every SAP senior’s eye and voice.

But why?

Do what you do best. Make suites. Run applications.

If you are great at making cars, let someone else handle temperatures of steel. If you serve delicious fries, let someone else grow potatoes. If you own petrol stations, why are you bothering with oil wells now?

Backward integration sounds good in strategic management classes. Not in the real world, when your years-old forte is brewing with opportunities and threats from all sides - being clouded, hard to maintain, and dotted with new memory-spots.

Well, naysayers can blabber all they want, but the wearer best knows where the shoe laces tie better. More so when he is getting ready for a good race, and not just a catwalk.

In a pre-emptive stride, at the Mumbai press meet, Steve Lucas, EVP and General Manager, SAP Database and Technology, tackled the question well in advance. “If Apple thought that making phones is only Nokia’s business, the world would have never got the iPhone.”

SAP is clearly flourishing a new weapon. A billion SAP Users by 2015 and more than $28 billion of revenues by the same year! That’s ambitious enough.

Exuding an equally pepped-up confidence, SAP India MD Peter Gartenberg fielded questions on arch-rivals. “Database majors have rested a lot on their laurels and it’s time for something better.”

‘The one who should not be named’ might find this new wand very interesting. Database is a pretty strong horcrux to chase though.

We manage to chase Steve however for a detailed answer. Here’s what SAP plans to chant next.

This may sound boring by now but we still don’t get it -Why Databases?

The logic is simple. Applications drive databases and not the other way round. We have about 170,000 application customers and some day, in some form, and time, they will be database customers. If we can do this piece better than others, why not? We are the fourth largest company here and we are going to change the pecking order soon.

How will SAP’s struggle with Netweaver fit into this new script going forward?

Those kinds of pieces are usually abstract and invisible. A scalable and secure ERP actually runs on a strong Netweaver but it’s ok if the users do not feel the specifics. That’s not required also. Good plumbing is seldom visible and Netweaver has done a good job at that. It will continue to do so.

But your rivals have been in this territory for ages. How do you plan to attack there?

The user in any IT environment needs a quick answer to his query. If there is a change in inventory, for instance, he needs to know the what and when, that’s it. Pulling out data can be agile and easy. But over the years, vendors have put layers and layers over the basic piece and made it complicated. They can not be blamed. They had no incentive to reduce this dramatic size and complexity. It meant revenues. With our new platform and analytics-powered strengths, we are going to convert all layers in one simple, easy piece.

When you brought out HANA, your rival said they have been doing it much before you. So who pulled the in-memory rabbit out of his hat first?

Bundling three existing products and dishing it out as a new in-memory product is not the way we did it. As to what they say, I guess that’s the best answer they can come up with.

Who and what is inside this new radar now? The big rivals, the third-party guerrillas or the small vendors who might be covering many pockets of application areas that are still out of SAP’s ambit?

Everyone has to be in the radar. Internet is a big equalizer. We have to keep our eye on everything. SAP continues to innovate and it has also proved with the acquisition graph so far that we have the capacity and appetite to acquire whenever and wherever it is called for.

What would you look for?

It has to be a right fit, not big or small necessarily. SuccessFactors might have appeared and sounded a small one but it was the right company. Between our big rival and other bubbles, it’s tough to opt anyone out. Both dimensions of the industry would co-exist for us. We are going to be a strong platform for HANA and other pieces.

What’s the next big idea and ambitions with HANA? How much of it is towards the world of Siri, being intuitive or predictive?

Text analytics, predictive etc would take it forward. The platform is getting bigger and the applications have got better. We are building our predictive capabilities, and doing progress on unstructured text analytics, which is a huge untapped market for us. It will be the platform for all customers, for all SAP applications, as per our ambitions.

Any implications with Hadoop?

It’s a little hard to use open source with Hadoop. One has to still find a programmer to query Hadoop. HANA and Hadoop have their own spaces, like hot and cold storage models may be. But end users do not care if it’s HANA or Hadoop. Time is what they care about a lot.

An analyst analogized it very aptly. Big data is like sea water. How do we drink it? Does HANA make it potable?

Yes. With information management tools, data extraction tools, quality tools, master data tools, we can access a rich set of information. It is sea water. What you require is not a bottle but how to get the salt out of it.

If you were to say three things to CIOs before you leave India, what would you say?

You are not going to be the only person to adopt HANA. Your competitors are already getting onboard HANA and your customers expect you to run faster. It is quick and easy to set up, like six weeks of a going-live time.