Customer Success Stories Drove Record Attendance at SAPPHIRE NOW

Having attracted more than 20,000 attendees in Orlando and close to 90,000 online participants, many people rightly see last week’s SAPPHIRE NOW as a success story. But customer success stories are the backbone of the SAP annual conference’s triumph.

Ron Dennis (left) returned to SAPPHIRE NOW to tell Jim Hagemann Snabe and everyone else about McLaren’s continued success.

The Vodafone McLaren Mercedes Formula 1 Team uses SAP HANA to evaluate billions of data bits in real-time, while SAP technology helps Lexmark International grow its business beyond printing. These customers and others, including National Bank of Canada, shared their stories of extreme analytics, improved efficiency and how it feels to run better.

Go, Speed Racer

People all over the planet will see SAP technology in action when they tune into the Grand Prix Montreal next month, as Cory Coley-Christakos reported in her blog post. HANA will help Woking, England-based McLaren monitor data gathered from hundreds of sensors on each of its two racecars, collecting a total of about 13 billion bits of data over the course of the race.

“There’s no point in having so much data in front of you that you can’t understand it,” McLaren chairman Ron Dennis told SAP Co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe during SAPPHIRE NOW’s Wednesday keynote presentation. “[HANA] blows people’s minds — it’s incomprehensible that anything can work so fast.”

Speed, scale and simplicity were the hallmark traits of HANA, as Dennis told it. SAP’s flagship in-memory platform offers real-time evaluation of massive data volumes; scales to use six times more data than other platforms; and allows simple graphic representations of all that data.

Fit to More Than Print

To meet customer demand, Lexmark is branching out from printers to bespoke hardware and software solutions, thanks to some savvy acquisitions — and help from SAP technology, according to Tim Clark’s coverage of Moody’s presentation in Orlando. The Lexington, Ky.-based imaging company uses SAP HANA and SAP BusinessObjects to power its drive into this brave new world, which also includes managed and cloud services.

SAP’s Fred Samson demonstrated the speed, scale and simplicity of HANA as McLaren uses it.

“SAP HANA gave us the ability to respond much more quickly to business requirements,” Keith Moody, Lexmark’s vice president and CIO, told attendees at SAPPHIRE NOW last week. “The performance of the team increased dramatically because they were able to generate reports so much faster.”

Lexmark’s implementation of the new database technology was also speedy. And a new analytics system lets Lexmark see all of its inventory parts on a global scale for the first time.

MAXimizing Potential

National Bank of Canada decided to transform in 2008, when it faced increasing error rates and declining customer satisfaction. The Montreal-based commercial bank approached SAP Financial Services, the company’s fastest growing and No. 1 industry, to co-innovate a standard process for retail lending with SAP CRM.

The Modernization Action Experience (MAX) today enables National Bank to improve sales efficiency and client retention while reducing distribution and operations costs. Loan approval times dropped from 48 hours to one, and the average number of products per National Bank customer rose from 1.9 to 4.5.

These success stories and the many more like them drove the highest attendance in SAPPHIRE NOW’s 25-year history, making the annual conference a smashing success in its own right.

Follow Derek on Twitter: @DKlobucher

Related Media:

“McLaren Chairman Ron Dennis Returns to #SAPPHIRENOW : Winning Races with SAP HANA” in SAP Business Trends

“Lexmark CIO: ‘SAP HANA gave us the ability to respond much more quickly to business requirements’” in SAP Business Trends

“Enslin: “Financial Services is the No. 1 Industry in SAP” at SAPPHIRE NOW” in SAP Business Trends