Key Takeaways From Optimal’s HANA Race Victory

The most thrilling competition by far at this year’s TechEd was the SAP HANA Real-Time Race. Optimal Solutions defeated Bluefin in deploying the most valuable powered-by-HANA solution in under 48 hours.

The contest was fierce, and the performance of both team was impressive. The judges — employees of one of North America’s leading food makers — who graciously provided the data and the requirements, applauded Optimal’s “polish”, speed and quality of the application, and the integrated nature of the solution that was built.

They declared the Optimal solution to be superior along 2 out of 3 dimensions and recognized Optimal as the overall HANA Real-Time Race award winner.

In a remarkable display of skill with SAP analytic/BI, SAP BW and SAP BPC; hands-on HANA know how; and unflappable poise under pressure, team Optimal team took SAP BPC financial data in SAP BW, migrated it to HANA, restated the financial data, built reports and dashboards and rendered the data on mobile devices.

In his recent blog post “What a Week“, Dr. Vishal Sikka, a member of the executive board of SAP AG and head of technology and innovation for SAP, underscored Optimal’s winning formula: “Optimal won the competition showcasing end to end solution delivery on BW/BPC/mobile.”

Soon after the SAP HANA Real-Time Race had finished, David Hull, senior manager of SAP HANA global marketing, interviewed key players from the winning team:

Optimal Solutions SAP Analytics/BI Solution and Practice Director Jeremy Stierwalt, EMC Global SAP Lead Henrik Wagner, and Cisco Global SAP Marketing Manager Rick Spire.

Here are some highlights from the interview:

Customers Challenges Presented (time it took team Optimal to complete specified challenges):

• Migrating SAP BPC on SAP BW to SAP BPC on SAP BW powered by SAP HANA (2.5-3hs)
• Running financial calculations and some financial variances, and restatements of financial KPIs within the SAP BPC on SAP BW powered by SAP HANA environment (restating millions of records within HANA took only a few minutes)
• Revolutionizing reporting in and around SAP BPC as it related back to HANA’s advanced capabilities utilizing a rich array of SAP Analytics/BI tools & solutions (consumed majority of the 48-hour time limit)

Key Customer Takeaways:

• Speed and process of getting HANA hardware appliance in place is fast and painless.
• Migrating/implementing on HANA a database or application — be it a traditional RDMS or SAP BW or some other application, is a relatively quick-and-easy endeavor, not nearly as challenging as some costumer may think.
• The overall stability of the HANA platform is strong, tested and proven, and HANA scales easily and infinitely

Optimal’s Jeremy Stierwalt spoke candidly about the processes of migrating an SAP BPC database to HANA; restating millions of records on SAP BW on HANA; and integrating advanced analytics into the HANA environment capable of revolutionizing reporting processes – particularly SAP Business Planning and Consolidation reporting processes – and delivering these reports via stunning, intuitive, interactive mobile dashboards.

The winning end game, according to Stierwalt, was to integrate myriad SAP products in an eloquent, deployed solution that satisfied the customer’s specified requirements.

Check out full interview: Winner of HANA Head to Head with SI Partners