—By Sunil Chavan
New Delhi, March 11: As businesses clamber to be profitable, extend their presence in the market and retain their customers, the role of data in the organisation is changing rapidly.
Estimates suggest that enterprise data is growing at between 40 to 60 per cent annually, driven by developments such as social media, mobility and cloud computing. Around the world, businesses with foresight are intently looking for ways to capitalise on this data deluge, and use it to work better and achieve quicker time-to-value.
Collating and analysing the data that resides within a company enables organisations to derive fresh and meaningful insights. It can also support innovation for competitive advantage, bring new customers and create better economics. Some industry watchers believe that processing big data can improve enterprise revenues by 25 per cent or more.
However, according to Hitachi Data Systems’ (HDS) research, the adoption of business analytics to exploit this data has been slow across Asia Pacific. Over half of the companies questioned had no understanding of what big data actually is or how it can be leveraged.
Against this background, business leaders are asking the same questions more urgently than ever before. How do I target the right customers? How do I create unlimited growth? How do I use big data to grow revenue?
Businesses are challenged by finding actionable insight from the data they already have. One solution is provided by SAP’s High-Performance Analytic Application (HANA), which is the fastest growing platform for high-speed in-memory analytics and business applications. It allows companies to process and analyse business operations in real-time, based on large volumes of structured data, and gain actionable insights.
SAP HANA unifies analytics and transactions on a single in-memory platform for real-time business performance. It is designed to scale and adapt to business needs as end-user and data volume demands grow over time. It is also a real game-changer in terms of speed, making existing processors faster without any disruption.
While SAP HANA supports predictive analytics capabilities that help to uncover trends and opportunities, it is rapidly evolving beyond business analytics alone. It is quickly becoming a central piece of many modern data centres, allowing users to extract vital business data from a variety of sources across the enterprise, such as Business Warehouse, ERP, CRM and other line of business applications.
In this regard, SAP HANA is a journey and not a destination. It lays the groundwork to leverage that data in real-time to achieve business goals, such as keeping customers and partners satisfied, winning new customers, expanding into new markets and driving revenue growth.
The in-memory computing technology at the core of SAP HANA demands processing, storage and transport at unprecedented speeds and volumes. To get the robust operational performance required for it to succeed, it is important to build it on the right platform. Ideally, that should be a converged infrastructure.
Converged infrastructures turn real-time dreams into reality
Converged infrastructure is an integrated solution comprising storage, servers, networking tools and software with comprehensive management. They are pre-tested and pre-configured, thereby reducing implementation risk and costs, and collapsing deployment time from months to days. With traditional IT solutions, a key application deployment can take six months or more. Converged systems routinely cut deployment times in half and can reduce deployment operational costs by up to 45 per cent.
Because a converged infrastructure is made up of tightly knit components, it is ideally suited to manage mission-critical environments within a single enclosure – and it delivers timely business intelligence and analytics.
Choosing the right partner is a critical decision. Only a converged infrastructure, designed by a trusted vendor and certified by SAP, can offer the reliability, scalability and performance needed to handle mission-critical business applications.Infrastructure that is optimally configured for SAP HANA, will help to accelerate adoption and achieve faster time to value. Organizations should also look for solutions that offer a single, virtualised and scalable storage and data management infrastructure for the complete spectrum of SAP production, test and development, and archival data.
Checklist for analytics success
Not all SAP HANA platforms are created equal. Regardless of which vendor the business decides to partner with, the successful solution should meet certain criteria. It should be delivered as a ready-to-deploy appliance or configuration with HANA software pre-installed provide a high-performance analytics platform. This reduces latency through accelerated load and processing performance
dramatically reduce the traditional delays between operations and analytics by delivering timely business intelligence and analytics.
These enable more robust yet simplified management, requiring less manpower to manage the converged infrastructure even as data volumes grow so that IT can refocus on higher value tasks deliver 99.999 per cent data availability and uninterrupted support. This ensures 24/7 uptime of mission-critical applications that support the most demanding, data-intensive environments streamline deployment with a certified and optimised sets of components, and end-to-end hardware and software integration.
If the solution meets the above criteria, the organisation is ready to bring real-time data into its business and put real-time analytics within everyone’s reach.