Hunting happy HANA customers
- Summary:
- HANA customers have been think in the ground but we found a good cross section at SAP TechEd && d-code - check links for video coverage
As is customary at large scale SAP events, Jon Reed and I set up our video shop at SAP TechEd && d-code 2014 with a view to hearing from whatever SAP could put in front of us. This is always fraught with last minute changes for one reason or another but as I produced the material we gathered, I was surprised by four things:
- TechEd is not the place you usually find customers talking openly about the value they derive from technology
- The variety of use and business cases on offer
- The lack of finagling needed to get people on camera
- The lack of last minute changes
On this occasion, we got a nice mixture of startups with real world cases that make sense along with customers talking about both HANA and Lumira, SAP's visualisation play.
Jon did all the customer and partner shoots (I have a great face for radio) but as I produced the footage, I was struck by the way startups and customers have found inventive ways to use HANA. In that sense, it appears HANA is starting to live up to its promise of enabling 'the art of the possible' while providing existing customers with fresh ways to drive value from existing investments and in new and novel ways.
In that sense, this runs contrary to the conclusions coming out of user group surveys although we should caution that what we see is a cherry picked subset of a much larger group of customers. Even so, the stories we surfaced join this occasion go well beyond speeds and feeds, a topic Jon discusses with some of those brought on camera.
Any vendor is bound to put up their best stories but the way we like to do our shoots means we usually get more practical insights into what's behind the headline. Jon did a solid job in getting customers and startups to talk openly about benefits and challenges. Here's a selection for your consideration:
Daimler Trucks improves sales - better parts utilisation, better sales opportunities. Lumira provides the front facing visualisation.
MyAthlete Tracker - real time GPS based tracking during a race for both athlete and others that currently generates 1 GB per athlete per race
Duke University on fan facing visualisations - Duke is mining decades of basketball data that can be used by sports stats enthusiasts. It plans to extend to other sports.
Animal Health International - originally a 'classic' accelerated BW on HANA case, the company is now stratifying data to provide fresh insights into products. An interesting case of the HANA 'journey.'
Johnsonville Sausage - trades promotion management for new products and demand signal management use case delivering quantifiable bottom line value.
AppOrchid - startup that is blending multiple data sources in a cognitive computing application framework for building decision systems uses HANA to ensure data is processed as close to real time as possible - with reference to an energy utility customer in Israel
Imaginestics - building the world's first image base search engine that needs HANA to process large quantities of data
Enterprise Jungle - uses natural language processing to build complex queries that help people discover and connect within large organisations. It sounds simple but it isn't. Utilises HANA, UI5, SuccessFactors and can pull in external data from sources like LinkedIn.