Days of Future Past

‒ Larry Ellison, June 10, 2014

• In the future, perhaps the database will evolve into an enterprise-wide, fully in-memory data platform (not some optional functions tacked onto a conventional database): ushering in the era of true real-time computing.

• In the future, maybe we’ll see a data platform that eliminates the latency, complexity, and massive redundancy that have long plagued enterprise computing environments, draining them of resources and robbing them of performance.
  

A utility company serving millions of customers will make substantial improvements to its ability to manage energy loads through real-time correlation of 5 billion smart meter records, a year of detailed weather history, geographical location information, and other customer data. A manufacturer of aircraft infrastructure will achieve a 30% increase in productivity through real-time analysis of more than two terabytes of value-chain and workflow data. A cancer research institute will leverage analysis on massive datasets including patient medical records, genome data, clinical trials, and other sources to develop a molecular profile of patients, enabling individualized treatment unlike anything that has come before.

A multinational consumer goods company will provide real-time access to supply chain data from more than 40,000 cost centers and will transform their customer records reconciliation process with the ability to provide instant reconciliation across some 4.6 billion customer records. A major telecom provider will create a single view of customer interactions across multiple channels, elegantly transforming both its core business processes and the customer’s overall experience. A major Asian hospital will improve care through real-time tracking of more than 300 clinical indicators for tens of thousands of patients.

And those scenarios are just the beginning.

I would like to offer my personal congratulations to the winners of the SAP HANA Innovation Awards — those listed above as well as all the other winners and, moreover, all the organizations who entered the competition. For that matter, I would like to congratulate the more than 3,300 organizations worldwide who have adopted the SAP HANA platform…so far.

Not only are these organizations achieving unprecedented results ‒ in many cases transforming every aspect of how they operate in a fundamental way ‒ they are demonstrating how unevenly distributed the future truly is. These pioneers are leading the charge into a whole new era of enterprise computing, while those who should be innovators and thought-leaders in this space attempt to “predict” a future that has already arrived.  

In case you haven’t heard, It’s a HANA World now. Please spread the word if you can; some people have a bit of catching up to do.