What’s holding you back from embracing in-memory technology and making your enterprise a real-time business? On the face of it, it’s hard to see any downsides. By enabling feats of analysis on streams of both traditional and unstructured data that were previously unimaginable, in-memory can breathe new life into processes, products, services and customer interactions.
For example, your Finance people could exploit terabytes of transactional data to transform activities such as planning, forecasting and pricing optimisation. Marketers could extract valuable trends and behavioural insights from customer data, and uncover concealed opportunities. Operations leaders could model the outcomes of decisions in a risk-free environment before taking action, or apply predictive analytics to anticipate risks, failures or resource gaps before they occur.
However, you may be daunted by the prospect of an on-premise deployment due to a shortage of IT resources, a lack of budget, or the timescales, risk and upheaval of an in-house project.
That’s why SAP has taken the step of making its breakthrough in-memory platform, SAP HANA, available via the cloud as a managed service. The enterprise-grade service is designed and built for mission-critical operations, combining the power of in-memory with the scalability and automation of the cloud – with no trade-offs in performance, integration, security, failover or disaster recovery.
Don Whittington, VP and CIO of Florida Crystals, the world’s biggest sugar refiner, explains why they chose to implement SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud: “We started late on Friday, had the migration completed on Sunday and it was literally business as usual on Monday.
Thanks to SAP HANA, they can now get answers much faster than ever before. Don Whittington knows what this means in practice: “SAP HANA isn’t just in-memory, it’s a new frontier. We can get information right across the supply chain. We can ask and find out why things happen.”
They can complete financial and operational tasks in real-time. So their people can move from being transactional to being analytical – and use their time to create business advantage. As Don says, “Our users can run accounts payable faster, close the books faster. We can run batch jobs in real-time. The opportunity is what do we do with that time?”
If you’ve been taking a wait-and-see approach to in-memory technology, this latest development allows you to implement projects quickly, safely and reliably.
It’s liberating and empowering. As Don Whittington says, “It’s a game changer.”
You can learn more at http://www.sap.com/realtime_data/our_experts or join the conversation at #redefinedata.
