SAP's executives have had a lot to say about in-memory and
column-store database technology in recent weeks. Wednesday at
SAPPHIRE, the company announced plans for two specific products:
The SAP Business Analytic Engine and a related High-Performance
Analytic Appliance to be built on hardware from partners HP and
IBM.
Promising "real, real-time analysis without risk," SAP executives
Vishal Sikka, CTO, and Hasso Plattner, Executive Board Chairman,
detailed the technology, which will blend up-to-the-minute
transactional information from within SAP applications with
historical data and other external data to enable real-time
planning, optimization and analysis applications.
An SAP press release stated the products would be available within
twelve months, but Sikka said he's pressing for release by the end
of 2010.
At the core of the SAP Business Analytic Engine is the in-memory
and column-oriented database technology that the company has
previously used in the Business Warehouse Accelerator and SAP
BusinessObjects Explorer products. On top of the engine is a
business-user-friendly data-modeling interface that is said to make
it easy for business analysts to bring data in from multiple
systems and model real-time analysis, planning or optimization
applications.
The High-Performance Analytic Appliance is the SAP Business
Analytic Engine delivered as a pre-integrated, ready-to-run,
hardware-software offering. It will be delivered by partners
starting with HP, and also IBM, much as the SAP BusinessObjects
Explorer and BW Accelerator appliances are currently offered to
customers. The availability of a software-only engine suggests that
cloud-based and embedded deployments are also a possibility.
The SAP Business Analytic Engine and the related appliance will
initially supplement, rather than replace, the relational databases
underlying SAP applications and existing data warehouses. As such
it would bring the benefits of real-time analysis without ripping
and replacing existing systems. Ultimately, however, Plattner laid
out a vision whereby SAP's new combined transactional and OLAP
engine will replace both data warehouses and the relational
databases running under SAP apps.
How long will it take for that transition to take place? In a
recent press conference , co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe said the coming
release is but the first step in a six-step vision for bringing the
technology to market. Analytic loads will be the first to move to
the engine, he said, but it will be many years before the engine
can become the underlying database for SAP applications.
Throughout this week, SAP executives have stressed that the company
embraces an open ecosystem and partnerships with other
best-of-breed vendors. Addressing the implications of introducing a
product that could ultimately replace data warehouses and other
databases, co-CEO Bill McDermott said SAP had briefed partners
including IBM, HP, EMC and Cisco on its plans. Partners are eager
to embrace the innovation, he said, and said they will find
opportunities to build new products and services around the
engine.
"As far as I know, there's only one company that thinks they have
to sell everything to every customer that would be most threatened
by this," McDermott said, in an obvious reference to Oracle. "We're
not overly concerned about this at this time."