In his keynote address on March 11, Quentin Clark, CTO of SAP opened his talk with this: “the industry is going through an incredible transformation as it realizes the opportunities to deeply modernize- and there is no better place to lead this than at SAP.”
Watch the full talk on SAP Insider.
Over the course of the last several months since Clark joined SAP, he has continuously championed the SAP Startup Focus program for its activities around bringing innovation into the enterprise, whether in the form of cutting-edge startup technology or startup’s testing and developing on SAP HANA and HANA Cloud Platform. In the following sound bite, we recap Clark’s talk, highlighting why the Startup Focus is a critical piece of an innovation-directed SAP.
The ability to keep pace with the increasingly fast pace of business will hinge on SAP’s agility in offering the power to harness big data through cloud, mobility, and analytics. Why is this important in today’s increasingly competitive business climate? Consider this statistic: more than 60 percent of CEO’s expect 15-50 percent of earnings growth in the next five years to come from tech-enabled business innovations.
In Clark’s eyes, it is incumbent upon SAP as a collective group to embrace the the age of information and drive forward knowing more about how to make it useful in a much more real time way.
With the entire modality of businesses and users transforming, SAP will need to provide the technologies will get business to the real meaning of “real time”. Here, Clark gives the example of enabling a retail store to operate hour to hour and getting it to the point where it is able to optimize revenue per square foot.
Midway through the talk, Clark mentions the important role that SAP HANA technology will play in realizing this future, and beyond that, the actual adoption of this technology by startups that have and will continue to bring new solutions to SAP customers across the globe.
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At this point, Clark calls out SAP Startup Focus and the 1,800 startups in the program that have recognized HANA as a foundational change in the way that data management can work and have seized the opportunity to invent new capabilities around data and build innovative application solutions.
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Following his introduction of the Startup Focus program, Quentin calls AppOrchid’s Director of Business Development, Dan Goldenblatt, onto the stage to share a use case about profit leaks in utilities. Goldenblatt explains the strategic advantage of a platform like HANA in delivering systemic identification of problems based on unstructured and structured data. By unlocking this ‘tribal data’ as AppOrchid calls it, HANA has been key to pinpointing where problems are housed in real time.
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