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The Indian development centre of SAP located in Bangalore has contributed about 20-25 per cent to HANA development, says Clas Neumann, Senior Vice President, Global Head, SAP Labs. In a conversation with Manu Sharma, he discusses some of the innovations in the enterprise apps space and how IT managers are leveraging them
What are the technological innovations you are presently working on in the enterprise application space?
Some recent innovations that attracted a lot of attention from customers have been with SAP HANA, which is a general purpose and ANSI standards-compliant in-memory database. Because of its design, it allows transactional and OLAP reporting in a single system, which makes it simpler and much faster than traditional RDBMS systems like Oracle.
In-memory DBMS technology will give businesses the performance necessary to quickly adapt to market changes and to enable them to discover trends as they occur and adjust accordingly. HANA is a key innovation from SAP and will also be a game changer in the market.
SAP Labs located in Bangalore has about 4,500 engineers in the product development team and another 1,000 employees in the software services team who have worked on this.
What part of HANA was developed in India? How is it impacting your customers requirements?
HANA was jointly developed across all the SAP R&D centres in USA, Germany, China and India. The Indian development centre located in Bangalore has developed some of the applications on top of HANA. A significant part, say 20-25 per cent, of this product was developed here, which is a big deal for us.
We are seeing increasing efficiency in the customer transaction and scheme (data points) redeeming process.
Just to state an example: assume a customer accumulates several points on every purchase--it takes a lot of effort to keep track of the accumulated points and keep a tab on credit points. Using HANA solutions which are 1,000 times faster in real time processing, a customer can easily calculate these.
To what extent are your customers involved in your innovation strategy? Can you elaborate on some of the co-innovations happening out of India?
While we constantly get feedback and requests from our 100,000 odd customers on a regular basis through the group forums, events etc, we work on co-innovation projects with our customers across the world.
From our strategic customers standpoint, we run co-innovation projects together on a different scale which would be more customised.
These projects revolve around enterprise mobility or any other technology they would ask for. The product or solution evolution would be completely based on the ideas and innovations that the customer would suggest. In fact, you can see a number of customers working at our labs 24X7 on the joint innovations.
We have an event called SAP Sapphire held on a regular basis globally which is a platform to drive innovative ideas along with customers. The event will shortly be held in Beijing.
We have classified technological innovations based on customer need and industry trends and also the verticals that we are strong in. For instance, we conduct focused events in Bangalore around supply chain management, mobility to understand customer requirements and develop the products based on global standards to suit local requirement and those which have better compatibility.
Co-innovation is not restricted to large customers; we encourage smaller companies such as SMEs, too. One of the well appreciated and co-innovated products is mInspection, a Sybase Unwired Platform based handheld device application used in plan inspection visits, to view assigned inspection lots and post the results and usage decision into SAP ERP. mInspection is developed in co-operation with SAP Co-innovation Lab as a part of partner delivered mobile applications (Padma) initiative.
In fact, five SAP partners participated in an app development program held last year. For developers to bring out the best of apps, SAP has instituted various programs to support and educate developers in building apps for Sybase Unwired Platform (SUP). The SAP Co-Innovation Lab (COIL) and SAP Mobility Unit carried out one such program called Padma with five SAP partners: Accenture, AkaaRa, Arteria, SIGGA, and Wipro.
Some of the other significant applications include: Chaitra, Condor, File Lifecycle Management, Policy Management Framework, Address Data Cleansing, Accenture (HCM Employee Lifecycle); AkaaRa Consulting (Project Insight); Arteria (Mobile Sales Force Automation); SIGGA (Work Order Execution); and Wipro (Meter Reading and Billing Solution).
How do you see future innovations in IT and spending given the global economic challenges?
Despite global recession, SAP Labs has not been impacted and has gone ahead with its research. We have been working along the lines of our core philosophy, which is growth.
All of Europe and the rest of the world are still cautious about spending too much on research. But we have kept to our guidance of continued research in the areas of cloud computing, mobility, HANA, BI and our core ERP for which we are stated to be market leaders.
Most customers, even today, approach us to seek solutions from us that could address their market need. The co-innovation process begins here.
Like in the retail space, small neighbourhood kirana shops across India can run a cash register for themselves, but no one has a product for them yet. But large FMCG customers such as Nestle, ITC, Proctor & Gamble and others use SAP products and want something more. These companies would demand a co-innovation on top of SAP that would help them grow their business.
We have developed a product with one of the FMCGs, but it is still in the development stage and is scheduled to be out soon.
How do you work out a pattern or model in terms of co-innovation and the logistics around it?
If it is a dedicated project and a good growth opportunity and a novel concept for us, we would jump into it immediately. For example, if we have, say, 10 customer feedback on certain solutions and a request for specific solutions to be developed about that, and the customer is ready to spend resources in the co-innovation process, we carry out a feasibility test and a proof of concept around five solutions.
On an average, for instance, we get over 1,000 customer feedback; we screen it down to a 100 and take it on a two-year process. But for the bigger retail projects like the one mentioned earlier, one cannot go through the standard process. We need a real dedicated team at the onsite project, maybe across various locations in India.
We have various models that we follow. The key is that the project is developed under our guidance and then rolled out. We ensure that the project runs smoothly on SAP and does not damage any data in the system. Another model is where we invite the customer to co-develop the product in our labs.
So it could be 50 per cent or even 80 per cent of development by us. But we follow a certain protocol for co-innovation and stick to our standards. SAP and the customer sign a contract in the process. Customers choose the model which closely matches their need.
In some cases, we help them develop the product so the IP is with the customer. If we develop it, then we have the IP and the customer gets royalty. But we are open in co-innovation.
How do you see the future of technologies and innovations shaping up? How are IT managers leveraging this?
Cloud computing as a technology will grow faster than other technologies. We see it expanding very rapidly because it has multiple advantages. I would rate this among the top technologies going forward.
Another technology would be mobility. With the number of mobile phones with internet increasing, I see huge opportunity for enterprises to leverage this technology.
Big data is another technology which redefines how enterprises will handle huge data in the coming years and how compiled data can be understood correctly. So like the traffic jams in Bangalore - if someone could collect and analyse the data, it would help resolve the traffic problem in this city. The same holds good in medicine: if you are de-coding your DNA, it would take weeks to analyse it; but by using big data, it could be faster.
IT managers will need to keep the systems up and running all the time, besides manage and oversee medium and large scale projects like networking, storage etc. Now we have a BYOD policy within SAP, wherein multiple entry points are open for potential hackers. Today the threat from hackers is not so much from outside but within the employees themselves. This is a big challenge for IT managers.
I feel many IT heads from SMEs companies dont have the knowledge yet to handle big new projects like cloud or mobility on their own, so they depend on a consultant or the vendor to implement it. I feel cloud architecture is very complex and a major challenge for many IT managers.
An innovative model around these technologies could be developed by IT teams leveraging the development labs research capabilities.
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