It recently occurred to me that I have been a little more frequent in my posts on Experience SAP HANA as compared to this forum. As I was contemplating a couple of different topics to discuss here, I ran across a new piece on CNN titled: Police embrace social media as crime-fighting tool by Heather Kelly (Aug 30, 2012). It carries a credible account of how law-enforcement is not only using channels such as Facebook to track suspected criminals but is also continuously refining how it actually goes about this business.
In an age when crimes are increasingly facilitated by electronic conveniences, tracking down a perpetrator should be theoretically easy as they often leave one or more electronic fingerprints, so to say. However, any one piece of data does not necessarily add up to damning evidence. Often, there is need to complete the picture by combining other data inputs with this – and sometimes in real-time. That can often mean we are dealing with the three V’s that describe data today – volume, velocity, and variety.
How do we deal with this? In an article I recently published on Data Informed, I touched on the aspect of how best to deal with the data management issues of today and the emerging future. In this article (How an In-Memory Database Management System Leads to Business Value), I describe how a true in-memory platform can bring about significant value by delivering true real-time insight. In the arena of crime-fighting this is obviously a significant aspect because timely detection of an imminent crime can lead to actions that prevent a serious incident as opposed to a post facto analysis of the “what” and “how” which still leaves authorities trying to catch up with the perpetrator(s).
Increasingly, the need for a platform like SAP HANA is becoming felt quite acutely. For example, there are solutions being devised (read: Run Secure - With SAP HANA) to prevent acts of terrorism that rely on SAP HANA for processing power, speed and scale. Naturally, even processes in other domains that can gain from these qualities will often provide a good reason to leverage SAP HANA. If innovation is truly your thing, then your organization should take a close look at what SAP HANA can do for you – preferably beyond the tremendous acceleration of your current or traditional business processes. With the SAP Tech Ed season upon us, now is a good time to plan on getting a deeper understanding of this amazing platform from SAP.
P.S. Lately, I have been posting more frequently about topics more directly related to SAP HANA. You can follow those blog posts at: Experience SAP HANA
