SAP: Why we’re the right vendor for Big Data

In the war to win mindshare on Big Data, SAP certainly is not pulling its punches.

In a sit-down session with the media two days ago, SAP put out its own campaign on why they were the right vendors to go to for Big Data compared to a competitor like Oracle or EMC.

It certainly seems like the vendors are really bullish about Big Data in the region in early 2013.

Head of database and technology marketing, Karim Mohamed, SAP Asia Pacific and Japan, gave three reasons why it made sense to go with SAP HANA (High Performance Analytical Appliance) for big data over their competitors.

Firstly, “SAP is vendor agnostic,” he said. At least it isn’t like Oracle’s Exalogic/Exadata platform, which locks you to their platform and their Sun hardware. With SAP HANA, you can go with any hardware vendor like Dell or IBM.

Secondly, SAP has been working on this space since the beginning. “Wouldn’t you rather work with somebody that is on version three of the product rather than on version one?” Karim countered.

And lastly, with Sybase Mobile enterprise, SAP has a great mobile software database stack, which often feeds into the use cases that Big Data looks at.

Whilst I would somewhat agree with Karim on his latter two points, his first one is a bit of a toss-up as vendor lock-in can be both a boon and a bane. Oracle, when I met them, argued that having their own hardware allowed them to optimize the best solution for their customers.

But what do the customers want from Big Data?

Still, arguing over which architecture is better for end users is semantics in my opinion, because end users don’t buy on specifications, they buy on solutions, as I’ve argued before.

So rather than talking about which architecture is the best, tell me about the use cases, or better yet, get your customers to do so.

According to Michael Barnes, Vice President and Research Director at analyst firm Forrester, Big Data’s use cases, for now, reside mainly in highly commoditized businesses where “relationships are everything”.

Mining the data to get to really know the customer to prevent churn is the key, and key sectors include retail, finance and telcos.

These are the market opportunities that SAP sees as well moving forward in the next two quarters.

According to Anthony McMahon, senior VP of database and technology SAP Asia Pacific, he sees a few key target audiences for selling SAP’s HANA.

Firstly, and a no-brainer, is to up-sell existing SAP businesses that they can benefit from Big Data, and SAP can pilot new projects with them.

Secondly, HANA can be used to help business warehousing operations who have “inflexible traditional database backends”, said Anthony, and the main benefits are speed and flexibility.

For example, he cited a Hong Kong insurer who managed to bring down the time taken to do a risk assessment from days to hours.

Also, making this switch is not a huge investment as the HANA appliance sits on top of the traditional RDBMS (Relational database management system) which hosts the data, so you don’t have to throwaway your existing server and storage infrastructure.

For now, 95 percent of HANA sales is direct — a telling point that most end users in Asia Pacific are just beginning to pilot Big Data solutions — but Anthony is hoping to move 40 percent of the SAP HANA through channels by 2015.