I am enjoying In-Memory Data Management- An Inflexion Point for Enterprise Applications – SAP kindly sent me an advance copy of the book by Dr. Hasso Plattner and Alexander Zeier. I am also watching Vishal Sikka, SAP’s CTO present this morning at its “New Reality” event in Boston talk about in-memory, mobility, clouds – as he says making the enterprise “cool again”
But I keep going back to a recent conversation on technology innovation I was part of. One of the participants defined an innovative company as one which generated at least half of its revenues from products introduced in the last two years. I like that definition – not just products a company marketed as innovative, but those its customers embraced in droves and quickly adopted. Apple iPad and Microsoft Kinect come to mind. Millions of units sold in months, (though admittedly Kinect does not make up half of Microsoft sales)
I find myself fascinated every time I listen to Hasso Plattner talk about in-memory (and the book brings out his passion for it in his professorial style). But I have heard him and SAP talk about it for years now (and I profiled him and the promise of in-memory analytics in my book last year) – yet product rollout via what it terms HANA and customer adoption has been a trickle.
Dr. Plattner’s book spends an entire chapter on cloud computing – and how in-memory computing will play an ever-increasing role in clouds. Again, SAP rollout of its cloud and customer adoption of that cloud has been slower than a trickle.
The issue is SAP is content selling older on-premise ERP and Business Objects technology. It would be like Apple moving to 3 year product rollout cycles, so we would just be seeing iPhone2 and we would wait till 2013 to see iPad2.
Well, Apple has not slowed down and that is the new benchmark for innovation. Love to see SAP similarly get half its revenues from HANA and clouds and other new products Vishal and team dream up.
