Sanjay Poonen gave a presentation on how SAP is “Leading the Analytics Revolution” at the first SDForum conference on analytics: “The Analytics Revolution” on 4/9/2010. Sanjay claimed that although SAP is a large corporation, like Gerstner’s IBM, ”the elephant can dance.” SAP is a leader and the largest vendor in the analytics space and considered by Garner to be the most visionary. Their approach is to focus on helping businesses solve their business problems rather than focusing on technology.
Sanjay pointed to a recent issue of “The Economist” as evidence that business people and not just information technology professionals are becoming more aware of analytics and business intelligence. The issue had a cover story about “The Data Deluge” that talked about how businesses have more data than ever before and they are just beginning to exploit it using Business Intelligence software, one of fastest growing categories of software.
One of the ways SAP is leading its competitors is by pushing Business Intelligence “on demand”, SAP’s SaaS (Software as a Service) offering. You can learn more and try out a free personal edition here. SAP is also leading by leveraging and working on disruptive emerging technologies including cloud computing, in-memory computation, and mobile technologies.
Sanjay predicted that analytics would be used to close the loop between strategy and execution. He said that people have tended to focus on strategy almost exclusively or execution but both are important. He quoted Thomas Edison’s dictum “Vision without execution is hallucination.” SAP wants to help companies go around the loop from strategizing to planning to executing to optimizing based on the results of execution. They will do this by providing an analytics and BI platform at the center of the loop that supports their customers at each step.
An interesting example of an application of SAP’s analytics involved improving sustainability and reducing the negative environmental impacts of a corporation. Several other examples involved specific verticals such as government and health care. Going forward, SAP believes that much of the growth in the future will involve targeting specific verticals so SAP is partnering with a large number of smaller companies to build industry-specific solutions on SAP’s platforms, including BI on-demand.
Sanjay’s presentation is available at dyyno.com.