How do businesses benefit from In-Memory tech?

BANGALORE, INDIA: In-memory technology promises impressive benefits for companies in many areas, but most significantly in cost savings, enhanced efficiency and greater immediate visibility across the enterprise that enables improved decision making.

Cost savings

Business of all sizes and across industries can benefit from cost savings with the implementation of in-memory technology. Database management currently accounts for more than 25 per cent of a company’s IT budget. Since in-memory databases use hardware systems that require far less power than traditional database management systems, they dramatically reduce hardware and maintenance costs.

In-memory databases also reduce the burden on a company’s overall IT landscape, freeing-up resources previously devoted to responding to requests for reports. And, since in-memory solutions are based on proven, mature technology, the implementations are non-disruptive, allowing companies to return to operations quickly and easily.

Increased simplicity and efficiency

Any company whose operations depend on frequent data updates will be able to run more efficiently with in-memory technology. The conversion to in-memory technology allows an entire technological layer to be removed from a company’s IT architecture, reducing complexity and infrastructure that traditional systems require. This reduced complexity allows data to be retrieved nearly instantaneously, making all teams across the business more efficient.

In-memory computing allows any business user to easily carve out subsets of business intelligence for convenient departmental usage. Work groups can operate autonomously without affecting the central data warehouse workload. And perhaps most importantly, business users no longer have to rely on IT support resources to gain relevant insight into business data.

These performance gains also allow business users on the road to retrieve more insightful queries through their mobile devices, which is increasingly important as more businesses incorporate mobile technologies into their operations.

Improved visibility to make better business decisions

In-memory technology makes it easier for organizations to gain complete oversight into the full range of their business data rather than limited insight into a subset of that data which has been extracted and put in a data warehouse. With this improved visibility, businesses can shift from after-event analysis to real-time decision making — and move the business model from response-based to predictive and planning.

When combined with easy-to-use analytic solutions on the front end, such as the SAP BusinessObjects 4.0 business intelligence platform, anyone in the organization can build their own queries and dashboards with very little expertise.

Impact on Lines of Business

Customer account management

With in-memory technology, customer teams can combine different sets of data quickly and easily to analyze a customer’s past and current business conditions, either in the office or from the road via mobile devices. Because business users can now interact with and query data in memory, they can experiment more fully with the data to create more insightful sales and marketing campaigns.

Sales teams have instant self-service access to the information they need, providing an entirely new level of customer insight that has the very real potential to maximize revenue growth through more powerful up-selling and cross-selling.

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Supply chain management

With traditional disk-based systems, data is processed in nightly operations, which often means that businesses are late in reacting to important supply alerts. With in-memory technology, businesses have full visibility into their supply and demand chain on a second-by-second basis.

They gain insight in real time to changing business conditions — such as early warnings for products that are low in stock — and can respond accordingly. 

Finance

Financial controllers are hit particularly hard with increased data volumes. Due to slow data-response times, they can be forced to limit their analysis time frames to several days instead of months or quarters. This can lead to a variety of delays, including the closing of financial periods. With in-memory technology, large volume data analysis and a flexible modeling environment means fast-close financial quarters and better visibility into detailed finance data across broad time periods.

Impact Across Industries

In-memory technology has the potential to help businesses across industries operate more efficiently, from consumer products and retail to manufacturing and financial services organizations. 

Consumer products companies can use in-memory technology to manage their suppliers, track and trace products, manage promotions, help with EPA standards compliance and perform analyses on defective and under-warranty products.

Retail companies can manage store operations across multiple locations, conduct point-of-sales analytics, perform multi-channel pricing analyses, and track damaged, spoiled or returned products.

Manufacturing organizations can use in-memory technology to ensure operational performance management, conduct analytics on production and maintenance, and perform real-time asset utilization studies.

Financial services companies can conduct hedge fund trading analyses, such as managing exposures to currencies, equities, derivatives and other instruments for clients. Using information accessed from in memory, they can conduct real-time systematic risk management and reporting based on market trading exposure.

Changing the Way Business Works

According to one estimate, approximately 30 percent of enterprises will have one or more critical applications running on an in-memory database over the next five years, and by 2014, 30 percent of analytic applications will use in-memory functions to add scale and computational speed.

In-memory technology offers the best available alternative to slow, costly disk-based data management systems. For those who move first to in-memory technology, the resulting boost in business insight, increased efficiency and reduced IT costs will give a true competitive advantage.

The author is vice president of Business Solutions, Database & Technology at SAP India.