A Universe of new Possibilities with SAP HANA

[former_member182913]

In my SAP HANA Trainings for development organizations, and in my regular pre-sales roadshows, I am continuously meeting very interesting people from all over the world, coming from different industry segments and company cultures in the private and public sector.

Some weeks ago during lunch with some SAP HANA trainees, we happened to talk about our lives outside the IT universe, and discussed a bit our different models of marriage...

Yes, you have read correctly... Some of us, and I belong to this particular category, live together with, or have married someone with the same academic background and a similar professional domain focus. Like always in life, this approach has Pros and Cons. In my case, we are both theoretical physicists, and later on we both became IT Enterprise experts. While our careers in the meanwhile have developed in different, complementary ways, we talk quite a bit about IT during our private lives and enjoy our technological discussions.

Some other people live other kind of lives. One of our SAP HANA trainees told me that he never had any business related common place with his wife...

... until they both met SAP HANA. His wife is working in the bio-technology research area, and that's when they discovered a new mutual passion: In-Memory computing.

One of the first things you hear about SAP HANA, in a nutshell, is that is is about high financial, manufacturing and enterprise execution speed and performance for processing and analysis of very large amounts of data in main memory. This is definitely one part of the story. Furthermore, drilling down into the whole potential of In-Memory computing, and of SAP HANA in particular, it is easy to show that it is not only about very fast mechanistic management of large amounts of data. It is also, and eminently, about the potential to discover and address a myriad of new possibilities which were unthinkable before.

Bio-medicine and bio-technology are some examples of areas where In-Memory computing has a high potential, but the universe of possibility is much bigger than that.

This reminds me of the following remark of Harald Lesch, a popular astrophysicist and scientific journalist in Germany. When addressing the mystery around the so called dark energy, he said that nowadays there is not exactly a lack of data about the accessible interstellar objects and diverse phenomena in the most remote corners of the universe. The challenge is rather related to the opposite: Over information, that is, large amounts of data which remain untouched, potentially relevant patterns which remain unrecognized. In high-energy particle physics, which used to be my métier some years ago, the challenge is similar. Actually, CERN is using Oracle, but I don't know the details. I will investigate a bit about it and keep you posted.

And now I have to go. I have a meeting some 12 Km away. I will take the bike, and use the chance to get a bit of fresh air and reflect about a couple of strategic things while doing some sport.

Speed is not everything.

Possibility is much more relevant and exciting.

Gemma Durany

Co-Founder and COO

Glooobal GmbH