Frankfurt, Germany, 19 May 2010
Global software company SAP unveiled the latest update to its on-demand business solutions software suite, SAP Business By Design 2.5, at the SAP Sapphire Now conference being held in Frankfurt, Germany.
Co-CEO, Jim Hagemann Snabe, who made the announcement yesterday, explained the game-changer for this upgrade is its in-memory analytics offering. He highlighted the rate at which data growth is increasing, noting that in-memory technology offers real-time access, management and analysis of data.
This offering marks the convergence of enterprise architecture, business intelligence and business processing, says Ingo Brenckmann, senior director of solution management for SAP. Discussing the evolution of the product, Brenckmann explained computing infrastructure today enables massive storage capacity and more efficient computing power.
He pointed to developments in multi-core architecture. “Chip makers are no longer increasing the frequency of their CPUs but they are increasing the number of cores. So the latest generation of CPUs has got eight cores and each of these cores can do two threads in parallel, and you don't have one chip you actually have four CPUs in one blade.
“All of a sudden, one of these little blade servers can do 64 things in parallel - that's massive,” Brenckmann opined. He believes the next step is to write the software to harness the potential of the hardware.
“We need to know how this architecture has been crafted and how to write the software that fully leverages the potential of this computing power,” he explained. Brenckman believes in-memory technology will be a game-changer in this area.
“In the past, all the technology was focused on disc, so the data was dealing with disc which takes some time to read the data. With in-memory technology, the focus is no longer on disc - we think memory,” he explained.
This will offer a convergence of analytics and real-time transactions, which Brenckman believes will spell the end of the report.
With the upcoming release, users can run sophisticated analyses in real-time with in-memory analytics and access enhanced usability through customisable reports, forms and user-interfaces. In addition, mobile workers can initiate business processes through support of mobile scenarios, he concluded.
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