THINK ACT

innovation. What convinced me was
what happened when we took the
technology to fifty customers. We
worked on very different scenarios
customer by customer, industry by
industry. And their feedback? “This
is beyond belief.” They were stunned
that you can simply push the enter
button and get an immediate
response to users’ reactions. In the
past this would have taken hours of
calculation.
This was a real ‘wow’ moment for
all of them. We recently presented
in-memory computing to a whole
series of companies who have now
seen a massive increase in their
opportunities, be it in production
management or probability analysis
by product. One utility company
that employs dynamic pricing for
electricity can now predict when
capacity will be needed on its
network. This saves the utility
company a lot of money and helps
consumers to minimize their use
of electricity.
This technology is clearly a musthave.
What are the downsides?
Implementation, perhaps?
I wouldn’t call it a downside, it’s
more of a challenge. If you don’t
have consistent data, it doesn’t
help that you can analyze it in one
second. Many of the stories about
the difficulty of implementing
SAP technology are related to the
fact that the SAP system requires
a high degree of data consistency.
We’ve been developing our system
to acquire that consistency.
If there aren’t any big drawbacks
and the technology is so powerful,
then why have only a few decision-
makers in business heard about it?
Initial conversations about inmemory
focused exclusively on
technology, making it irrelevant for
business people. It’s only recently,
with the results from those fifty
customers, that we can communicate
how this technology can
solve business problems that were
previously unsolvable. Also, there’s
a lot of confusion about the topic.
Many people talk about in-memory
computing, but they all mean different
things. We’re working on
this. In-memory computing is a
technological advance that we’re
now translating into distinct business
value. We can articulate how
this will change the game in every
single industry. This is the moment
that it becomes relevant to business
people, and then they need to try it,
because most of them can’t believe
it’s true. I’ve been in the industry for
20 years and sometimes I’ve seen
technology improving cost effectiveness
by a factor of 5. With this,
we’re talking about a factor of 200.
It’s not only about reporting much
faster: it’s about solving problems
that you couldn’t solve before.
What comes after in-memory
computing?
In the next five to ten years, we’ll
see similar developments to those
that followed our introduction
of the client-server system in the
1990s, when networks became
faster and more powerful. Now
we’re riding the wave of in-memory
computing combined with multicore
processors. Google has taught
the world how to search for information,
but we still haven’t learned
how to find it. This technology can
bring us much closer to finding not
only the hay in the haystack, but
also the needle.
Five years from now, how much
of the SAP portfolio will involve
in-memory computing?
All of it.
Interview by Thomas Ramge
Illustration Smetek
THINK: IN-MEMORY-COMPUTING
ACT
The digital revolution is
transferring more and
more data onto company
databases.
The more data there is,
the harder it is to analyze
using traditional IT methods.
With time in increasingly
short supply, managers
with rapid access to data-
based analysis can achieve
a significant competitive
advantage. In-memory
computing promises to
analyze the business world
in real time, since data
retrieval is no longer limited
by the relatively slow speed
of hard disks.
Instead, information is
analyzed by increasingly
powerful memory chips.
This is not just a nerdy IT
issue; data-based processes
are increasingly important
to the success or failure of
businesses in a growing
number of sectors. Big data
is a huge opportunity, but
only for those who can sort
the wheat from the chaff and
draw the right conclusions.
THINK ACT SEPTEMBER 2011 19