A) Tom Raftery had a layup question for Peter Graf who is leading SAP's sustainability initiatives.
"And of course, by delivering your software as a service, you will help the environment (by hopefully running more efficient and centralized data centers across customers)?".
Peter jumped on it. "Yes, our recent acquisition (around carbon footprint analytics) Clear Standards is a delivered as a service."
Tom followed up "No, I mean that entire SAP suite as a service."
Peter: "Oh, not allowed to discuss that delivery schedule..."
It did not stop Dr. Hasso Plattner from discussing it in his keynote. "The bear (the SaaS BusinessByDesign) is hibernating in the winter. It will be out this summer."(Feature Pack 2.5 is expected then).
B) For his turn, Dr. Plattner spent most of his speech on the promise of in-memory processing of super-compressed, columnar data. After making the audience salivate, he said "of course, that's me as a professor talking. I am not committing SAP to any schedule"
C) I asked Jonathan Becher who leads solution marketing when SAP would get into predictive and web analytics. That's where most of the innovation should be happening (and a partnership was previously announced with SPSS) . After all the new Explorer, while nice was essentially a prettier, more "guided", faster representation of historical, internal data. He agreed - having personally spent time in start ups in each of the predictive and web areas.
So when would SAP offer them? His response - you guessed it:
"Watch this Space"
