Living in the Layers
In his moving poem “The Layers”, the great American poet Stan Kunitz wrote, “Live in the layers, not on the litter”. A wise sentiment to help drive the renewal of enterprise landscapes, especially at a time when we keep seeing re-assembly and re-packaging of existing layers into new bundles, that seem to promise lower-cost integrated systems, but in fact add to the clutter that already exists in enterprise landscapes, at a time when we must, and we can, help enterprises achieve massive simplification, renewal, and true real-time performance and scale, without disruption.
Over the last 24 hours, many many of you have asked me to comment on Exalytics. Then earlier today, some colleagues came by looking for my candid perspective on all this. The impromptu video that resulted from this conversation, and my off-the-cuff, candid thoughts, are here.
I must admit, I didn’t put too much thought into my answers. My more comprehensive position, of course, is to be found in my and Hasso’s Sapphire keynote earlier this year, as well as in my TechEd keynote last month.
The key is: the new real-time is fundamentally about dissolving the layers of complexity that enterprises see today. We can take advantage of hardware innovations to rethink the layers that sit inside enterprises, for straight forward analytics but also operational reporting as well as planning and forecasting, plus transactional and other forms of applications. In doing this, we can completely transform the way companies run their businesses and enable people to think and work and interact with one another in entirely new ways. It’s about simultaneously enabling new horizons, and simplification of the existing layers of complexity, without disruption.
I look forward to sharing more news with you, especially with regard to our cloud endeavors, at TechEd India in 2 weeks. Incidentally, more than 10k attendees are coming to see us in Bangalore; a great sign of our customers’ and our ecosystem’s trust in our open innovation.
Best,
Vishal
Thanks for sharing this nice video (with its not so nice direct link à 146MB, we don't all have HANA yet) with your initial thoughts on Exalytics. For me the main eye-opener was that Exalytics is apparently not working on operational data but only on pre-aggregated data, whereas HANA will be (in the future?).
Looking forward to hearing more on this at SAPTechEd Madrid (but please don't talk only about HANA there 😉 ).
Cheers, Fred
Something that almost everyone has glossed over since TechEd LV occurred during one of the keynotes. The speaker asked the audience how many were planning a HANA implementation, and apparently 5% (or less) of the audience raised their hand. Even when / if in memory databases become more common place, the other parts of an Enterprise Solution will still be required.
Yes, I will be attending some HANA sessions in Madrid, because the technology is interesting, but I will also be attending sessions on mobility, identity management, GRC etc. I see the later areas making a bigger difference to SAP's bottom line (and mine) than HANA, because of the volume of customers that use / need them day to day.
hth